What Characterizes "Situations" in Situation Awareness? Findings from a Human-centered Investigation

Situation Awareness (SA) is one of the core concepts describing drivers’ interaction with vehicles, and the lack of SA has contributed to multiple incidents with automated systems. Despite existing definitions and measurements, little is known about what constitutes the concept of situations from users’ perspective, i.e., do they have a similar or different understanding of situation dynamics? Therefore, we conducted a video-based experiment where participants had to mark the onset of new situations from their perspective, provide a continuous criticality rating, and justify their decisions in a post-test interview. Our results indicate that the understanding of situations, their complexity, and their duration is quite diverse between people and independent of properties such as age, gender, or driving experience, while partly being influenced by the road type. Additionally, we found correlations between subjective situation durations, criticality ratings, and algorithm output, which can be exploited by future applications and experiments.