Comparative analysis of SAGAT and SART for evaluations of situation awareness

Abstract

Situation awareness (SA) has become an important criterion for systems evaluation efforts. Several measures of SA have been developed, the most widely used among them being the Situation Awareness Global Assessment Technique (SAGAT) and the Situational Awareness Rating Technique (SART). SAGAT provides an objective measure of SA based on queries during freezes in a simulation. SART provides a subjective rating of SA by operators. This paper presents a direct comparison of the two measures which were used within a display evaluation study. It was found that both SART and SAGAT contributed sensitivity and diagnosticity regarding the effects of the display concept. The SART measure was highly correlated with subjective measures of confidence level, a simple subjective SA measure and a subjective performance measure. The SAGAT and SART measures were not correlated with each other. The implications of these findings for the interpretation of subjective SA measures are discussed as well as advantages and disadvantages of both measurement approaches.