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Technology's role in the fight against malicious cyber-attacks is critical to the increasingly networked world of today. Yet, technology does not exist in isolation: the human factor is an aspect of cyber-defense operations with increasingly recognized importance. Thus, the human factors community has a unique responsibility to help create and validate cyber defense systems according to basic principles and design philosophy. Concurrently, the collective science must advance. These goals are not mutually exclusive pursuits: therefore, toward both these ends, this research provides cyber-cognitive links between cyber defense challenges and major human factors and ergonomics (HFE) research areas that offer solutions and instructive paths forward. In each area, there exist cyber research opportunities and realms of core HFE science for exploration. We raise the cyber defense domain up to the HFE community at-large as a sprawling area for scientific discovery and contribution.

Situation awareness (SA) brings together theories in cognition to examine what an operator perceives, understands and predicts about their environment. Previous characterization of working memory (WM) influence in levels of awareness however is sparse and has several shortcomings, including how both WM and SA have been measured. In the current experiment, a factor analytic approach to WM was adopted based on performance on three different WM tasks. These factor scores were then related to SA which was measured over two forms of scenarios in a complex dynamic decision-making task. In one scenario, Level 1 SA was assessed, and the other assessed Level 3 processes implicitly. Findings from 99 participants indicate WM was unrelated to Level 1, but was related to Level 3 SA with the relationship strengthening with increasing task experience. These results refine and contribute to ongoing theory in the context of SA and dynamic task performance, and provide future directives to individual differences research in human factors.

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The STOM model is useful for predicting cognitive tunneling given that human-in-the-loop simulation is time-consuming and expensive.