Measuring situational awareness aptitude using functional near-infrared spectroscopy

Abstract

Attempts have been made to evaluate people’s situational awareness (SA) in military and civilian contexts through subjective surveys, speed, and accuracy data acquired during SA target tasks. However, it is recognized in the SA domain that more systematic measurement is necessary to assess SA theories and applications. Recent advances in biomedical engineering have enabled relatively new ways to measure cognitive and physiological state changes, such as with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). In this paper, we provide a literature review relating to SA and fNIRS and present an experiment conducted with an fNIRS device comparing differences in the brains between people with high and low SA aptitude. Our results suggest statistically significant differences in brain activity between the high SA group and low SA group.