The motor intentional core of situation awareness

Abstract

The situated approach to situation awareness (SA) claims that system operators often offload information instead of constructing detailed, stable and internal representations of dynamic situations. Offloading, which can be more or less deliberate, is the attenuation of internal processes in favor of augmenting external ones. Operators do this to minimise costly internal processing and storage. This paper uses empirical evidence and phenomenological analysis to argue that situated SA presupposes a motor intentional core. This core refers to embodied skills whose function is to present states of the system as being a certain way. They include, for example, the skillful eye scan patterns of experts and various epistemic actions that involve manipulating objects in the physical world to make information available to other cognitive processes. Through these motor intentional skills, offloaded information can be accessed on an as-needed basis. We discuss metrics for assessing the motor intentional core, as well as implications for interface design and the training of system operators, arguing that many motor intentional skills can be taught directly.

Keywords:

• Cognitive processes
• motor intentionality
• offloading
• phenomenology
• situation awareness
• situated cognition

Disclosure statement

The authors report there is no conflict of interest.