An Ecological Perspective on Team Cognition

Abstract

Technology has complicated the role of the human in most complex systems. Manual or motor tasks carried out by a single individual have been supplanted by multiple-person tasks that are highly cognitive in nature. Assembly lines have been replaced by teams of designers, troubleshooters, and process controllers. Teams plan, decide, remember, make decisions, design, trouble shoot, solve problems, and generally think as an integrated unit. These activities are examples of team cognition, a construct that has arisen with the growing need to understand, explain, and predict these cognitive activities of teams. But does team cognition mean that teams think or is it that the individuals within the teams think, relegating team cognition to a collection of individual thinkers? Questions like these are important prerequisites to understanding team cognition.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2004
Accession Number
ADA525964

Entities

People

  • Jamie C. Gorman
  • Leah J. Rowe
  • Nancy J Cooke

Organizations

  • Cognitive Engineering Research Institute

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Autonomy
  • C4I
  • Engineered Resilient Systems
  • Human Systems
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Aircrafts
  • Cognition
  • Cognitive Systems Engineering
  • Cognitive Workload
  • Command And Control
  • Complex Systems
  • Group Dynamics
  • Information Processing
  • Knowledge Management
  • Measurement
  • Perception
  • Photography
  • Psychological Phenomena And Processes
  • Psychology
  • Situational Awareness
  • Social Psychology
  • Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Readers

  • Military History of the United States in the 20th Century.
  • Systems Analysis and Design
  • Team-Based Human-Centered Cognitive Task Decision Making and Information Performance.