Cognitive style, as a stable individual characteristic, provides critical insights into safety training and personnel selection in nuclear power plants; however, the underlying mechanism by which cognitive style influences situation awareness (SA) remains unclear.This study combines subjective scales, behavioral tasks, eye movements, and electroencephalography data to explore the influence of cognitive styles on the three stages of operators’ SA: perception, understanding, and prediction. It also constructs a SA assessment model based on cognitive styles.

The results revealed that field-dependent operators were more susceptible to information interference during the comprehension and projection stages, leading to increased cognitive and mental workloads, accompanied by significant activation in the parietal and temporal regions. These effects subsequently impaired attentional resource allocation and situational comprehension abilities, resulting in lower overall SA compared to field-independent operators. The grey wolf optimizer-support vector machine model constructed using subjective, physiological, and behavioral features achieved an identification accuracy of 83.3%. This research provides theoretical and methodological support for enhancing safety training and personnel selection in nuclear power plant control rooms.