This article came from this thread

Peter Steinhoff

Situational awareness is a subject that I find very interesting and I believe there is much to improve upon when it comes to dive instruction.

It can certainly be taught but in order to do that situational awareness as a concept needs to be broken down and structured. Some of the best info regarding this and also Crew Resource Management (team work) comes from the flight industry and especially warfare where teaching situational awareness is essential for survival.

If we organise SA into three levels, we have:

Level 1. Perception
Keeping track of our environment (currents, wild life, navigation, lines), our instruments (gas, depth, time, direction), our buddies (position, lights, stress level, swimming pace) etc.

Level 2. Comprehension
Taking the information we have and making a picture of our current situation. For instance having 100 bar in our doubles means nothing unless we combine it with all information like gas consumption, depth, direction of travel, position of dive boat, swimming speed, decompression obligation etc and form an opinion of our current state. Do we need to go up or turn around?

Level 3. Projection
Projection of future events is when we can play out "what if" scenarios and decide on different courses of action and know what their implications are going to be. For instance you are diving a wreck in really cold water and at the end of your planned bottom time you find that bell you have been looking for. To decide if you have time to shoot some pictures of it you need to consider a couple of things, for example: how much more bottom time do you need, how much more deco would that mean, how much longer total time in the water, water temperature at shallower depths (hypothermia?), slack/tide/current situation, backgas and decogas reserves, any potential problems reaching the upline when going back, surface or support diver situation regarding extended times.

To learn situational awareness you first need to master the basics of diving so you have time to look around and think. Then you need to learn what potential problems you are likely to encounter in different situations so you can look for them, anticipate them and if possible avoid them. Finally you need to develop your understanding of cause and effect and build you own mental picture of how all the moving parts connect.

There are several ways for an educator to fascilitate the development of situational awareness and I personally find it interesting and rewarding to constantly trying to refine and improve my own methods.

Part 2

The definition of the SA model in three levels comes from research (Endsley 1988) so I can't take credit for it - I do believe however that it is the model most applicable to diving.

When I teach this I go over the three levels of SA first because it is easier to understand something when you can organise it in your mind. Since it is team diving we do the ability to communicate is paramount and seriously affects SA. It's all team members responsability to keep track of each other but we have a range of procedures to acually accomplish this and they need to be taught and practiced.

From this platform we can go on and build level 1 situational awareness, which at first means keeping track of time, depth and gas. It's however very difficult to memorize something that doesn't mean anything so most students can't keep track of these variables to a satisfying degree. The solution is to segment the dive into managable chunks that has some meaning. In cave diving for instance that could be 1-putting in the reel, 2-going in, 3-coming out, 4-taking the real and deco. For each of these segment you routinely check time, gas and depth. Because you have done this on several dives these figures means something to you. For instance will you find out that you will become faster and faster at running the reel, high flow will slow you down severly until you learn how to handle it, a too fast pace means that you are wasting energy and will not reach as far into the cave as going slower etc etc.

Regarding keeping track of other things it is something we develop as I increase the task load. For instance when somebody is running the reel in the team you know they are a bit more task loaded so you as a good buddy need to pay extra attention to things in their surrounding. And if you are the reel person you should know this and act accordingly, meaning from time to time stop what you are doing, make sure your buddies are with you, check your surroundings, look where you are going. Task management in another word.

Actually in different scenarios you need to shift your attention to different things. Looking at the levels that means that level 2 and level 3 affects what information you need to keep track of at level 1.

Each level of situational awareness is build on the previous one. For example, when you can keep track of time, depth and gas you can start thinking about gas consumption, gas management, swimming speed and decompression obligation. When you have that down you can start to think about what if's.

As you learn this you will build a mental map of how things interconnect. It is difficult for to obtain level 3 SA because it requires a high level of understanding and that takes time to develop. And if you don't have the foundation to stand on (meaning the understanding and pratice of the previous levels) you can't do it.

Situational awareness is primarily a mental or cognitive skill. My primary tools for teaching it is in scenarios I create under water with the briefing and de-briefing of the dives. I also use lectures, case studies, home work, cause and effect charts and mental training.

To answer you last question: There might exist a 6th sense but I believe very good situational awareness is what you describe and that can be taught.
================================================== =====

for more information look here => http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situational_awareness