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Inadequate situation awareness and response are increasingly recognized as prevalent critical errors that lead to young driver crashes. To identify and assess key indicators of young driver performance (including situation awareness), we previously developed and validated a Simulated Driving Assessment (SDA) in which drivers are safely and reproducibly exposed to a set of common and potentially serious crash scenarios. Many of the standardized safety measures can be calculated in near real-time from simulator variables. Assessment of situation awareness, however, largely relies on time-consuming data reduction and video coding. Therefore, the objective of this research was to develop a near real-time automated method for analyzing general direction and location of driver's gaze in order to assess situation awareness.