Improving performance in complex environments: The effect of multitasking training on situation awareness

Technological complexity and information overload exceeding human cognitive capacity threaten situation awareness (SA) in safety-critical systems. This thesis investigated training SA in complex environments. First, a systematic literature review of SA training using vote counting due to high heterogenicity provided some evidence of training transfer, but controlled experiments and those with lower similarity between trained and tested tasks were less likely to find training transfer. Next, two experiments of mobile app-based multitasking training to improve SA with undergraduate and Army participants replicated trainability of multitasking, but no far transfer was found. A meta-analysis increasing statistical power did not change outcomes.