Driving and Situation Awareness: A Cognitive Model of Memory-Update Processes

Abstract

Safe driving requires a mental representation of objects and situ- ational features relevant to the driver’s behavior. This includes the generation of predictions of how the situation will develop in the near future. These processes are summarized under the term “situation awareness”, previously proposed in the aviation domain. By now the cognitive mechanisms underlying situation awareness are far from being understood properly. In this paper we propose a theory that is based on results from studies in language understanding [1] and attention [2] and that is applied to the driving context. Mechanisms for the con- struction of a situation model and for the selection of actions are outlined. Fi- nally, predictions of the model concerning the effect of experience, relevance, and criticality on the drivers ́ mental representation are investigated. In a second study the effects of cognitive tasks on predicting events in traffic are focused.