Theory of Activity and Situation Awareness

The intent of this article is to show that Russian theory of activity, only now made available to Western scientists, can describe and explain phenomena noted in the West and can do it sometimes more comprehensively than other cognitive theories. Activity theory as described by Bedny and Meister (1997) is still quite unfamiliar to the mass of Western psychologists and ergonomists. Because no single article can encompass all behavioral phenomena, one construct, situation awareness (SA) has been selected as a case study to show what activity theory can do. SA as described by Endsley (1995) is not a simple construct but incorporates almost all variables involved in a comprehensive theory of human behavior, with particular attention to its cognitive elements. SA phenomena include aspects of attention, perception, symbol analysis and interpretation, memory, anticipation of future states, deduction from partial information, and so forth. The position is advanced that SA phenomena can only be understood as part of the structure of a comprehensive theory of activity. In particular, SA must be viewed as part of cognitive activity that is intensely dynamic.