Reactivity Effects of Situational Awareness SPAM Questionnaires on Enroute ATC

Air traffic complexity demands high situational awareness (SA) among air traffic controllers. SA comprises three levels: perception, comprehension, and projection. This study examined the development of SA in inexperienced participants. We wanted to study whether mere exposure to SA levels through probes specifically designed for each level could generate a scaffold for the development of SA. Participants were assigned to five groups: three SA level questionnaires, a complete questionnaire, and a control group. Following the SPAM methodology, we measured response times, accuracy, and ATC task performance. We found that the SPAM questionnaire produced reactivity effects in the ongoing scenario, and that these effects were modulated by the SA level group. However, these effects did not systematically transfer to a subsequent scenario for all the SA level groups. Specifically, only the projection group continued to use the same strategy developed in the first scenario. In addition, our results support that the conception of SA structure is not entirely hierarchical since participants could answer higher-level probes without first having to answer lower-level probes. Implications for designing SA training interventions are discussed. These findings indicate that real-time SA questionnaires elicit short-term reactivity but fail to produce lasting impacts, limiting their utility for SA training.