Cognition in work teams has been predominantly understood and explained in terms of shared cognition with a focus on the similarity of static knowledge structures across individual team members. Inspired by the current zeitgeist in cognitive science, as well as by empirical data and pragmatic concerns, we offer an alternative theory of team cognition. Interactive Team Cognition (ITC) theory posits that (1) team cognition is an activity, not a property or a product; (2) team cognition should be measured and studied at the team level; and (3) team cognition is inextricably tied to context. There are implications of ITC for theory building, modeling, measurement, and applications that make teams more effective performers.
When people coordinate as a team, they accomplish more than they would working alone. These team-coordination effects give new meaning to Aristotle's famous phrase, "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." In this article, I consider two central issues confronting team-coordination research: Do the causes of team coordination reside within individual minds or between them, and at what levels of analysis (e.g., physiological, cognitive) do team-coordination effects occur? These issues are viewed in light of specific lines of coordination research, and some features of a general theory of team coordination are offered.
Objective: We report an experiment in which three training approaches are compared with the goal of training adaptive teams. Background: Cross-training is an established method in which team members are trained with the goal of building shared knowledge. Perturbation training is a new method in which team interactions are constrained to provide new coordination experiences during task acquisition. These two approaches, and a more traditional procedural approach, are compared. Method: Assigned to three training conditions were 26 teams. Teams flew nine simulated uninhabited air vehicle missions; three were critical tests of the team's ability to adapt to novel situations. Team performance, response time to novel events, and shared knowledge were measured. Results: Perturbation-trained teams significantly outperformed teams in the other conditions in two out of three critical test missions. Cross-training resulted in significant increases in shared teamwork knowledge and highest mean performance in one critical test. Procedural training led to the least adaptive teams. Conclusion: Perturbation training allows teams to match coordination variability during training to demands for coordination variability during posttraining performance. Although cross-training has adaptive benefits, it is suggested that process-oriented approaches, such as perturbation training, can lead to more adaptive teams. Application: Perturbation training is amenable to simulation-based training, where perturbations provide interaction experiences that teams can transfer to novel, real-world situations.
Decentralized command and control settings like those found in the military are rife with complexity and change. These settings typically involve dozens, if not hundreds to thousands, of heterogeneous players coordinating in a distributed fashion in a dynamically networked battlefield laden with sensor data, intelligence reports, communications, and plans emanating from many different perspectives. Consider the concept of team situation awareness in this setting. What does it mean for a team to be aware of a situation or, more importantly, of a critical change in a situation? Is it sufficient or necessary for all individuals on the team to be independently aware? Or is there some more holistic awareness that emerges as team members interact? We re-examine the concept of team situation awareness in decentralized systems beyond an individual-oriented knowledge-based construct by considering it as a team interaction-based phenomenon. A theoretical framework for a process-based measure called 'coordinated awareness of situations by teams' is outlined.
Public reporting burden for this collection of information is estimated to average 1 hour per response, including the time for reviewing instructions, searching existing data sources, gathering and maintaining the data needed, and completing and reviewing this collection of information. Send comments regarding this burden estimate or any other aspect of this collection of information, including suggestions for reducing this burden to Department of Defense, Washington Headquarters Services, Directorate for Information Operations and Reports (0704-0188), 1215 Jefferson Davis Highway, Suite 1204, Arlington, VA 22202-4302. Respondents should be aware that notwithstanding any other provision of law, no person shall be subject to any penalty for failing to comply with a collection of information if it does not display a currently valid OMB control number. PLEASE DO NOT RETURN YOUR FORM TO THE ABOVE ADDRESS.
Because they are not content based, and because they are automatic and fast, these new methods may be amenable to real-time communication pattern analysis.
The quality of a team depends on its ability to deliver information through a hierarchy of team members and negotiate processes spanning different time scales. That structure and the behavior that results from it pose problems for researchers because multiply-nested interactions are not easily separated. We explored the behavior of a six-person team engaged in a Submarine Piloting and Navigation (SPAN) task using the tools of dynamical systems. The data were a single entropy time series that showed the distribution of activity across six team members, as recorded by nine-channel electroencephalography (EEG). A single team's data were analyzed for the purposes of illustrating the utility of multifractal analysis and allowing for in-depth exploratory analysis of temporal characteristics. Could the meaningful events experienced by one of these teams be captured using multifractal analysis, a dynamical systems tool that is specifically designed to extract patterns across levels of analysis? Results indicate that nested patterns of team activity can be identified from neural data streams, including both routine and novel events. The novelty of this tool is the ability to identify social patterns from the brain activity of individuals in the social interaction. Implications for application and future directions of this research are discussed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.