Spatial awareness: Comparing judgment-based and subjective measures

Spatial awareness is important in domains where safety hinges on human operators keeping track of the relative locations of objects in their environments. While a variety of subjective and judgment-based measures have been used to evaluate spatial awareness, none have probed all three of its levels: 1) identification of environmental objects, 2) their current locations relative to the operator, and 3) their relative positions over time. This work compares new judgment based measures of spatial awareness that probe all three levels of spatial awareness to conventional subjective measures. In the evaluation of 14 configurations of Synthetic Vision Systems head down displays (7 terrain textures and 2 Fields of View (FOVs)), 18 pilots made 4 types of judgments (relative angle, distance, height, and a beam time) regarding the location of terrain points displayed in 112 5-second, non-interactive simulations. They also provided subjective awareness and SA-SWORD measures. ANOVA analyses revealed that comparable results were found between display configurations that produced the minimum error in judgments and those that received the highest subjective ratings. However, none of the subjective measures were correlated with judgment error. Thus, given that the judgment based measures were explicitly designed to measure all three levels of spatial awareness, the subjective measures may not be measuring spatial awareness.