Situational awareness is the ability to comprehend and understand your current environment. This involves not just being aware of what's around you, but also understanding the context of the environment, how it might change, and the implications of that change. It's like a holistic understanding of the environment, rather than just a surface-level understanding. This concept was first explored in relation to aviation back in the early 20th century to help design the cockpit. It is the perception of the elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their status in the near future.

It is very crucial for us to understand the human way of situational awareness because it gives us the possibility of making it happen via a machine. When a machine can understand the current situation and make inferences about what's likely to happen in the near future, it can make better, more informed decisions.

The formal definition of SA is often described as three ascending levels:

1. Perception of the elements in the environment → The first level of SA requires the machine to collect and process a lot of raw data to develop a basic understanding of the elements in the environment, including objects, people, systems, and environmental factors. This can be thought of as the machine "taking a snapshot" of the current situation. This process can be complex and involve a lot of sensors, but it's essential for developing the first level of SA.
2. Comprehension or understanding of the situation → The next step in SA formation involves a synthesis of disjointed Level 1 SA elements through the processes of pattern recognition, interpretation, and evaluation. Level 2 SA requires integrating this information to understand how it will impact upon the individual's goals and objectives. This includes developing a comprehensive picture of the world, or of that portion of the world of concern to the individual.
3. Projection of future status → The third and highest level of SA involves the ability to project the future actions of the elements in the environment. Level 3 SA is achieved through knowledge of the status and dynamics of the elements and comprehension of the situation (Levels 1 and 2 SA), and then extrapolating this information forward in time to determine how it will affect future states of the operational environment.

It is very important to note that accurate mental models are one of the prerequisites for achieving situational awareness. A mental model can be described as a set of well-defined, highly organized yet dynamic knowledge structures developed over time from experience.

Situation awareness is to fully organize the system in a specific environment to complete the theme task using a comprehensive manifestation of various human cognitive activities, such as purpose, feeling, attention, motivation, prediction, automatism, motor skills, planning, pattern recognition, decision-making, motivation, experience and knowledge extraction, storage, execution, feedback, etc. The establishment and maintenance of situational awareness can be a difficult process for people in different fields and environments. It is reported that pilots spend most of their time ensuring an accurate psychological description of what happened in real time.

There is one more aspect of decision making which is very important to discuss here. Herbert Simon’s “satisficing theory” says that humans are a "satisficing" decision maker, as opposed to an "optimizing" decision maker. A satisficing decision maker will choose the first option that meets their minimum criteria, whereas an optimizing decision maker will try to find the absolute best option, even if it takes a lot of time and effort. Simon argued that humans are satisficing decision makers - we don't have the time or resources to find the absolute best option, so we settle for something that's good enough.

I believe we can turn more of our satisficing decisions to more optimized ones because of more processing and data collection resources.