Translation of Situation Awareness Rating Technique Questionnaire in Slovenian

Situational awareness (SA) or knowing what is going on around you is essential in any dynamic human decision-making process because it provides the level of knowledge needed to make informed decisions and take appropriate actions 1. There is not a single agreed upon definition of situational awareness, but the three most commonly used definitions (see Table 1) all seem to refer to three aspects that constitute a situationally aware operator: gathering information from the environment to obtain a knowledge of the situation, interpreting the perceived information to understand its meaning in relation to the observed system, and being able to plan or project the next step of the systemǯs operation. All these aspects indicate that SA is a cognitive construct that requires multiple resources rather than a single one. As such, SA is also inextricably linked to other cognitive theories, such as attention, short term and long-term memory, and cognitive workload. Cognitive workload is often defined as a function of the supply and demand of attentional and processing resources 2. It is constrained by the operator's limited short-term memory (working memory), and processing resources are influenced by the operator's domain knowledge in long-term memory 3. More experienced operators have a broader range of skills and can therefore process larger or more complex information in their working memory. At the same time, as the workload increases, more attention is required for task performance, leaving fewer resources for situational awareness 2. In this regard, SA competes with task performance for attentional and processing resources. Assessing situational awareness is therefore not an easy task and requires the observation of several psychological constructs.