The Relationship Between Situational Awareness and Attention Networks of Roller Operators in Virtual Reality

Roller operators must pay attention to the elements in the environment to recognise them, stay safe, and avoid potential hazards. The ability to perceive and understand what is going on around them and to predict situations is called situational awareness (SA). Successfully fostering SA in a dynamic situation requires attention. Although the relationship between situational awareness and attention has been researched previously, the link between attention networks and situational awareness has not been researched before within the roller operators when compacting roads. This study aims to explore the relationship between attention networks and situational awareness in the context of road construction. Thirty-seven participants took part in the present study. The VR environment allows them to complete a task in compacting roads and to measure their situational awareness. The attention network test to measure the efficiency of each of the networks of the participants, and the SAGAT test was applied to measure their situational awareness. Multiple linear regression analyses confirmed that there was a non-significant relationship between situational awareness levels and each of the attention networks. In conclusion, this study was an initial step in researching the association between the SA and attention networks in VR. Keywords: situational awareness, attention networks, alerting network, orienting network, and conflicting network.