Is Situational Awareness a Skill? What 2,860 Studies Show

Is situational awareness a skill, or is it something a person either has or doesn't? A 2025 systematic review answered that directly. It pulled together 2,860 empirical studies on situation awareness published between 1975 and 2024 across eleven fields, from aviation and surgery to driving and the military, and treated every one of them the same way: as a set of observable behaviours, not a fixed trait. That answer matters more now than it did a decade ago, because the newest place this skill gets tested is not a cockpit or an operating table. It is a screen, and a person deciding how much to trust what an AI system just told them.

Level one: perceiving what changed

The review defines situation awareness the way Endsley did in 1995: perceiving the elements in an environment, understanding what they mean, and projecting where they are headed. Perception is the floor, not the ceiling. It is the plain, unglamorous act of noticing that a number moved, a tone changed, or an AI-generated summary stopped matching the document underneath it. Skip this step and the other two never get a chance to run, because a mind cannot comprehend or project something it never registered in the first place.

Level two: understanding what it means

Noticing a change is not the same as knowing what it costs. The second level asks what the new information actually implies for the task at hand, which is where most of the real judgement sits. Higher situational awareness among surgical, anaesthesia, and emergency teams is associated with better performance and fewer errors, the review found, precisely because those teams are trained to ask what a change means before they act on it, rather than reacting to the first plausible read.

Level three: projecting what happens next

The third level is the one a checklist cannot substitute for: deciding what is about to happen and acting before it does. This is the level that separates a person watching a process from a person actually supervising one. Targeted training helps people without direct experience build sufficient situational awareness quickly in a new environment, which is the empirical case for treating this as a trainable habit rather than an instinct a person either has or lacks.

Why this domain is growing fastest where humans work with machines

Research attention has moved with the work. Between 2011 and 2020, published studies on situation awareness grew 562% in research centred on the physical environment, 1,072% in research centred on the human operator, and 1,088% in research centred on machines and automation, the fastest growth of the three groups the review tracked. A growing research field is not proof that any individual reader's job depends on it. It does track where the discipline expects the next failures to happen: not in the machine, and not in the environment, but in the moment a person decides how much to trust what a system just told them.

The six domains this site measures name this one directly, as noticing that the picture in your head has stopped matching the room. The same case this site makes about adaptability applies here: a habit graded on what someone did the last time the picture changed is checkable, a self-description is not. The proof-over-claims argument this site keeps making holds for this domain like every other one. The check scores it directly, alongside five more, in about seven minutes.