Abstract: There always has been a focus on helping operators deal with the situations in which they find themselves in the 50 years of human factors research. An important construct that continues this tradition is situation awareness (SA). Working memory and long-term memory seems at first blush to be a critical component of SA. Typically, in the human-machine system of visual monitoring, operator has several tasks at hand, some of which are in interrupted state while others are being carried out. There is evidence that some individuals develop better SA than others. The differences among individuals are attributed to the difference in the underlying cognitive processes that constitute SA. This study aims to reveal the memory process involved in the maintenance of SA in simulating visual monitoring task and disclose the relationship between memory process and SA difference among subjects. There are two alternative accounts both used to explain memory process in interrupted activities. The first is long-term working memory theory (LTWM). The second is template theory (TT). This study tested those ideas by creating very demanding interruption conditions that would hamper maintenance of pointer and other representations in short-term working memory over the interruption. A task of conflict detection with cockpit display of traffic information was simulated. Two experiments were performed to investigate the effect of interruption on situation awareness in conflict detection task. The independent variables of the two experiments were complexity of interruption task and subject experience (skilled subjects and novice subjects). The dependent variable is situation awareness. In experiment 1, the interruption task of mental rotation was adopted. In experiment 2, the interruption task of multiplication verification was adopted. The results of the two experiments showed that the interruption tasks had no effect on situation awareness of skilled subjects, regardless of the complexity of interruption tasks. Meanwhile, the situation awareness of novice subject deteriorated when the conflict task was interrupted by mental rotation task and multiplication verification task. The situation awareness of skilled subject was higher than novice subjects under each experimental treatment.

Key words: situation awareness, visual monitoring task, long-term working memory, short-term working memory

摘要： 本研究通过模拟复杂人机系统的监控作业，考察了长时工作记忆与短时工作记忆在情境意识保持中的作用。研究采用模拟的飞行相撞判断任务，通过考察中断任务对情境意识的影响，分析情境意识在记忆中的存储地点，以及保持时间是否会突破1分钟的限制。本研究选择了心理旋转和算式判断两种中断任务。实验结果表明，在问题回答之前的中断阶段，无论施加心理旋转任务，还是施加算式判断任务，无论中断任务的加工负荷与记忆负荷有多高，熟练被试的情境意识始终保持于较高的水平，并没有因受到中断任务的干扰而出现下降。新手被试的情境意识受到心理旋转任务和算式判断任务的显著影响，而且两种任务的执行速度越快、记忆负荷越大，情绪意识水平就越低。本研究结果说明熟练被试可以利用长时工作记忆存储情境意识，新手被试主要利用短时工作记忆存储情境意识。

关键词: 情境意识, 监控作业, 长时工作记忆, 短时工作记忆