Book excerpt: The importance of 'situation awareness' (SA) in assessing and predicting operator competence in complex environments has become increasingly apparent in recent years. It has been widely established that SA is a contributing factor to many commercial and military accidents and incidents. Yet determining exactly what constitutes SA is a very difficult task, given the complexity of the construct itself, and the many different processes involved with its acquisition and maintenance. This volume brings together recent developments from researchers and practitioners from around the world who are studying and applying SA from a cognitive perspective. The 41 contributors represent many different theoretical perspectives, research approaches and domains of application. Each chapter has a primary emphasis around one of three main topics - theory, measurement and application and examines the considerable inter-linkage between them. To bring further coherence to the book, all of the contributors received draft manuscripts of those chapters most relevant to their own. Designed to be completely international and interdisciplinary, the authors themselves present varied perspectives from academic departments and industrial organisations from around the world, and from broad applications - with contributions from researchers in the domains of process control, sport, aviation, transportation, and command and control. The readership includes practitioners, academics and researchers within human factors, ergonomics and industrial psychology; Graduate and Undergraduate students specialising within these areas during their final year.