Team Cognition in Distributed Mission Environments

Abstract

We report here results from the initial-two years of a longer three-year project carried out at NMSU for the first two years, with the third year at ASU East. This work is directed toward long-range objectives to develop and validate measures of team cognition, and at the same time, perform empirical studies to better understand team cognition in the context of military team environments. This part of the effort focuses on the increasingly common 'network centric' military environment in which individuals who are distributed in space communicate, share information, and make critical decisions over a richly interconnected network. In the first two years of this project we collected data from two experiments to examine the effects of DMEs (Distributed Mission Environments), in which team members are geographically dispersed, on team performance, process, and cognition under high and low levels of workload. In parallel, measures of team cognition were further developed, validated, and extended to DMEs. The setting for this research was a synthetic three-person team task based on USAF Predator Uninhabited Air Vehicle operations. This synthetic task environment is housed in ASU East's (formerly NMSU's) CERTF (Cognitive Engineering Research on Team Tasks) Laboratory. Results indicated minimal deleterious effects of DMEs on performance, but some effects of DMEs on team process and knowledge. In addition there were significant effects of changes in workload on team performance. Not only do results from this proposed work have implications for military DMEs, but they also extend the scientific base of knowledge pertaining to team performance, process, and cognition in DMEs and the specific influence of DME factors such as communication mode familiarity and co-presence on team cognition.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 30, 2003
Accession Number
ADA417678

Entities

People

  • Nancy J Cooke

Organizations

  • University of New Mexico

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Autonomy
  • Human Systems
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes
  • Space

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Aircrafts
  • Applied Psychology
  • Cognition
  • Cognitive Systems Engineering
  • Command And Control
  • Engineering
  • Environment
  • Group Dynamics
  • Military Research
  • Psychological Phenomena And Processes
  • Psychology
  • Simulations
  • Situational Awareness
  • Students
  • Unmanned Vehicles
  • Workload

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Research Science/Academic Research
  • Team-Based Human-Centered Cognitive Task Decision Making and Information Performance.

Technology Areas

  • Space