Mutual awareness: Enhanced by interface design and improving team performance in incident diagnosis under computerized working environment

• A Mutual Awareness Tool (MAT) was proposed to enhance mutual awareness.
• Effects on team performance in accident diagnosis were examined.
• The results show that the embedded MAT enhanced team mutual awareness significantly.
• Accident diagnosis performance was improved.
• The increase in mutual awareness led to a reduction of individual situation awareness.

Mutual Awareness, which measures understanding of the behaviors and status of other members in a team is supposed to influence team decision-making process in safety-critical tasks/systems. This study aims to explore enhancement of mutual awareness by adding a Mutual Awareness Tool (MAT) on a user interface and examining its effects on team diagnosis performance in emergency situations of a simulated nuclear power plant system. According to the experimental results, the embedded MAT on the operation interface enhanced team mutual awareness significantly, and improved incident diagnosis performance. The results also showed that the increase in mutual awareness led to a reduction of individual situation awareness, possibly due to the limited mental resources.