Situation awareness during driving: Explicit and implicit knowledge in dynamic spatial memory

This study investigated people's ability to monitor changing spatial information in a simulated driving task. Drivers' knowledge of the locations of traffic cars was assessed with both direct recall measures and indirect performance measures. The direct and indirect measures were positively correlated (associated), suggesting that drivers' knowledge of nearby cars is largely explicit with little contribution of implicit knowledge. When there were too many traffic cars to monitor, drivers used cues such as car location to focus attention on potentially hazardous cars. When drivers had more active control of the driving task, they remembered the locations of potentially hazardous cars more accurately than when they viewed driving scenes in a passenger mode. These findings have implications regarding how people maintain situation awareness during real-time tasks and potentially for the development of dynamic tests of driving ability.