Getting to the Objective: Analyzing Navigation, Automation, and Situation Awareness from a Soldier’s Perspective

Land navigation ability is essential for US Army soldiers, who must use it both when planning routes to an objective and while executing the mission itself. Soldiers use automation to offload the cognitive effort of navigation, but if the system fails soldiers must expend precious time and mental energy reacquiring their location on a map. Despite this risk, soldiers still over-trust automated navigation and lose their location-related situation awareness. Loss of situation awareness leads to an inability to acquire the necessary spatial knowledge required to manually navigate. This paper reviews existing research to examine the effects of automation on situation awareness and a user’s ability to build a cognitive map from a soldier’s perspective. It further identifies issues with current technology and suggests possible directions for future research.