"Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) is emerging as a field of research providing a descriptive view of how people make decisions in actual settings that often feature unstructured problems imbedded within complex and dynamic systems. Decision making in these settings tends to differ significantly from the analytic style inferred from structured laboratory decision tasks that form the basis for traditional decision theory research. A growing body of research indicates that under realistic conditions experts make decisions using a holistic process involving situation recognition and pattern matching to memory structures to make rapid decisions (Dreyfus, 1981; Klein, 1989, 1993; Klein, Calderwood, & Clinton-Cirocco, 1986). Within this framework, a person's situation awareness (SA), an internal conceptualization of the current situation, becomes the driving factor in the decision-making process. For novices as well, who may operate using very different decision strategies, understanding the situation frequently poses the major portion of their task. In most settings effective decision making largely depends on having a good understanding of the situation at hand". (Endsley, "The Role of Situation Awareness in Naturalistic Decision Making," Chapter 26, p. 269 in Zsambok, Caroline E., and Gary Klein (Eds Naturalistic Decision Making. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997, 414 pages.