A Multiplayer Team Performance Task

Abstract

This chapter describes a Team Performance Task (TPT) that has been designed to assess the status of a three-person team operating a game-like multiplayer task requiring inter-player cooperation to achieve optimal performance effectiveness. The objective of the TPT is to extract features of an operational setting that may be integrated into a task scenario that will yield multi-dimensional indices of both individual and team performances that are sensitive to alterations in the workload parameters and to the skill level and cohesion of the players. The design of a prototype task is described in detail, and evaluative results based on observations of five groups of three players are presented to show the individual and team metrics of performance effectiveness that are made available with this task. Future applications of the TPT are suggested, to include its potential to diagnose and support the cohesiveness and operational readiness of teams operating within space-based and other challenging environments.

Behavioral Economics and Empirical Public Policy

“…This tool, known by the current prototype software's generic working title “Price of Cooperation” (PoC), applies behavioral economic demand curve principles, with voluntary cooperative behavior as the primary commodity that increases in “price” over the course of the session. We recently published details of our preliminary development efforts for a team performance task (Emurian et al, ) and several forthcoming papers are now in preparation describing the PoC's parameters and early validation efforts, including its sensitivity to contextual variables such as “budget” (i.e., increased cooperation with increased session length) and “social distance” (i.e., ability to objectively discriminate between groups composed of friends vs. groups composed of strangers). Through support from the U.S. space program, our work thus far has focused primarily on construct validity and how trait‐like PoC “profiles” may predict and track variations in interdependent task performance and social cohesion in long‐term work groups.…”

Behavior analysis of team performance: A case study of membership replacement.

“…Second, because the task had a completion requirement, a barrier hit by an individual member reduced the point accumulation, indirectly affecting all members of the team by extending the duration of a session. In that regard, a greater degree of task interdependency resulted, in comparison to the previous study that imposed a time limit on a session (Emurian et al, in press). For example, in the present scenario, barrier hits and degraded performance (e.g., a slow rate of point accumulation) by one team member would have a general effect on the team, not just on the individual team member exhibiting such performance, no matter the rate of barrier reveals exhibited by that member.…”

“…The TPT was designed for use by three-person groups, and the prototype has been described in detail elsewhere (Emurian et al, in press). Figure 1 presents a screen shot of the display presented to a subject (in this case, User1, the designation for S1).…”

“…The following six barrier reveal delays were presented within successive components in the following order for all eight sessions of the study: (1) .25 sec, (2) 1 sec, (3) 4 sec, (4) .25 sec, (5) 1 sec, and (6) 4 sec. These durations were chosen to match the range of delays evaluated previously (Emurian et al, in press). For the individual condition (I), each subject was required to accumulate 20 points to complete a component.…”

“…A three-person team performance task (TPT) was proposed as a tool to diagnose the status of a crew (Emurian, Canfield, Roma, Gasior, Brinson, Hienz, Hursh, & Brady, 2009), and the rationale of its design, from the perspective of behavior analysis, and an evaluation of its effectiveness have been reported (Emurian, Canfield, Roma, Brinson, Gasior, Hienz, Hursh, & Brady, in press). The initial evaluations were based upon having subjects perform the task for fixed time periods (e.g., 12 min), with instructions to maximize performance effectiveness.…”