To function effectively, a team must act as an information-processing unit, maintaining an awareness of the situation or context in which it is functioning and acquiring and using information to act in that situation. This team cognition differs from individual cognition, of course, because each team member acts as an individual information processor. For a team to act in concert to achieve common goals, the team must have shared information about both the situation and the other team members. Team cognition thus requires communication-a process that has no direct analog in individual cognition-in order for the team to build and maintain a shared mental model of the situation. Because communication is essential to team performance, effective team cognition has a communication "overhead" associated with the exchange of information among team members. Communication requires both time and cognitive resources, and, to the extent that communication can be made less necessary or more efficient, team performance can benefit as a result.The team experiment efforts reported here were sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). We would like to express our appreciation for the support and review of Willard Vaughan and Gerald Malecki at ONR and Sam Schiflett and Linda Elliott at AFRL.

Developer's thought processes are a fundamental area of concern. Cognitive scientist have discovered that people's intiative inferences and probality judgments do not strictly conform to the laws of logic or mathematics, and that people are willing to provide plausible explanations for random events. This article examines the role these phenomena might have in software development, ultimately concluding that what are cast as one-sided software development guidelines often can be recast beneficially as two-sided trade-offs.

These findings have the potential for the identification of methods to help clinicians learn how to use statistical and probabilistic information to better assess risk and to promote integration of decision support tools into medical decision making for improvement of patient safety.

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