Temporal awareness: pivotal in performance?

This paper describes an experiment where operators have to deal with various parallel asynchronous processes. The authors were interested in the level of 'temporal awareness' developed by the operator. By temporal awareness, one means the ability of the operator to build a representation of the situation including the recent past and the near future. The hypothesis was that this ability is linked to other elements of performance. The authors also looked at the effects of an aid aimed at supporting the construction of temporal representation. The experiment showed that this support system was largely ineffective, but that the presence of temporal awareness proves to be a good indicator of performance, both in terms of errors committed and multiple-goal optimization.