Towards the characterization of communicative, behavioral, and physiological signals during team facilitation events to support human-machine teaming

Abstract

Effective teams are critical to the successful completion of Air Force objectives, yet, interpersonal dynamics, individual traits, and environmental factors can dramatically reduce the overall effectiveness of teams. Facilitation of collaborative problem-solving processes can ameliorate these issues, but human facilitation is often infeasible in dynamic and uncertain environments, such as those common to military operations. Further, as a scholarly community we know very little about the fundamental mechanisms through which human facilitators engender trust and influence team climate. The goal of the current proposal is to characterize and predict signals of trust and psychological safety (a measure of team climate) during facilitated problem solving, informing the design of future machine agents. Emerging research within human-machine teaming is beginning to leverage machine agents as team managers or facilitators, finding machine agents can, in some cases, perform as well as human facilitators. We highlight, however, while this emerging work demonstrates what affect machine agents have, we do not understand how or why human or machine agents affect individual and team behaviors during facilitation events. Without such knowledge, we cannot effectively train human or machine agents to manage or facilitate team problem-solving.

Document Details

Document Type
DoD Grant Award
Publication Date
Feb 29, 2024
Source ID
FA95502310143

Entities

People

  • Jessica Menold

Organizations

  • Air Force Office of Scientific Research
  • Pennsylvania State University
  • United States Air Force

Tags

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.
  • Strategic Security Studies
  • Team-Based Human-Centered Cognitive Task Decision Making and Information Performance.