Bjørn Sætrevik

• Selective attention
• Cognitive control
• Decision-making
• Situation awareness

Research interests: A major research interest has been how situation awareness (SA) is generated and used, by individuals and by teams. SA implies the perception of critical information in the environment, synthesizing the information to a coherent mental model, and using the model to simulate future events. SA feeds directly into the individual’s decision-making and actions, and is part of a feedback loop within a complex and dynamic environment. The concept is thus critical for maintaining safety in high-risk organizations. While the definition of SA and related research has traditionally had an applied focus, part of the research interest has been to address it within a cognitive psychology framework. One aspect of this has been to develop and test various lab experiments that create analogous settings for measuring SA and testing how risk is handled. The aim has been to validate findings from other research traditions and to identify cognitive mechanisms. Another aspect of this research interest has been to construct a survey questionnaire in order to measure SA in large-scale datasets, and to test assumptions of how individual and organizational factors determine SA, and the safety outcomes of SA. A third aspect of this research interest has been to conduct field-studies of how a team of individuals with disparate information access collaborate to create a shared SA, and to measure the extent to which team members diverge in their SA, while not having clear indicators for what an accurate or desirable SA would constitute. Two research interest related to this, has been qualitative studies of how the leader’s communication with team members influences the sharing of safety critical information, and studies of how the social power between parties in a distributed, collaborative system influences the communication between the parties. A different research interest has been neurocognitive experiments to study recursive effects in selective attention. This implies that whether the attentional system attends or ignores one of the available signals makes it more or less likely to attend the same signal when it is repeated. An aim for future research will be to integrate several of the lines of research mentioned above, and implement it with a clearer focus on decision-making in an applied setting.

Contact information: Email: bjorn.satrevik@uib.no, Research group: https://www.uib.no/en/rg/oprg, Department: https://www.uib.no/isp