Macrocognition in Teams

Theories and Methodologies

Michael P. Letsky, Norman W. Warner, Stephen M. Fiore, C.A.P. Smith, Norman W. Warner, C.A.P. Smith, Michael P. Letsky

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317102847
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Team collaboration involves many operational tasks such as team decision-making or course of action selection, developing shared understanding, and intelligence analysis. These operational tasks must be performed in many situations, often under severe time pressure, with information and knowledge uncertainty, large amounts of dynamic information and across different team characteristics. Recent research in this area has focused on various aspects of human collaborative decision-making and the underlying cognitive processes while describing those processes at different levels of detail, making it difficult to compare research results. The theoretical construct of 'macrocognition in teams' was developed to facilitate cognitive research in team collaboration, which will enable a common level of understanding when defining, measuring and discussing the cognitive processes in team collaboration. Macrocognition is defined as both the internalized and externalized mental processes employed by team members in complex, one-of-a-kind, collaborative problem solving. Macrocognition in Teams provides readers with a greater understanding of the macrocognitive processes which support collaborative team activity, showcasing current research, theories, methodologies and tools. It will be of direct relevance to academics, researchers and practitioners interested in group/team interaction, performance, development and training.

Chapter 1
Macrocognition in Teams

Michael Letsky and Norman W. Warner

Macrocognition in teams

The concept of Macrocognition in Teams began as the research kernel of the larger issue of how to understand and facilitate complex collaborative team activity – specifically collaboration in quick-response ad hoc teams. This topic was driven by interest from both commercial and military communities as the forces of evolving sociotechnical systems, globalization and pervasive information accessibility changed the nature and dynamics of team activity. It is becoming increasingly evident that there are internalized, non-quantifiable, mental processes at work as teams collect, filter, process and share information for problem-solving purposes. More specifically, teams are engaging in the process of knowledge building including creating new ‘team-level’ knowledge that is not the mental property of any one individual. It is this knowledge building process that macrocognition seeks to investigate. What are the supporting components, are they measurable, are they consistently present, are they subject to lab experimentation, are they extensible and how do they interact and affect team performance? This was the motivation for the initiation of the Collaboration and Knowledge Interoperability (CKI) Program that was established at the Office of Naval Research (ONR) in 1999.

The Program

The core of the CKI Program is focused on basic research, in the terms of the ONR, ‘Discovery and Invention’. The program is principally an academic grants program with a multidisciplinary perspective and a core in cognitive science. The largest basic research project is in the form of a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) which is managed by the University of Central Florida. About half of the CKI program consists of a number of small business innovative research (SBIR) initiatives, which are 2–4 year projects with the specific objective of producing usable products from the underlying CKI technology that can be transitioned to various user communities. The program therefore maintains a research focus on basic science phenomena and also produces short-term products as individual components of the technology mature. Customers are typically military-based but the SBIR program also strongly encourages commercialization.

Program objectives

The objective of the CKI program is to respond to emerging needs in both the military and business environments to better understand and improve the effectiveness of team decision-making in complex, data-rich situations. Specifically, there is a need to better understand cognitive processes employed when collaborating to solve problems that are characterized as one-of-a-kind, time compressed, high-stake problems, supported by uncertain, open source data. Advances in communications technology and the need to involve a broader community in team decision-making further characterize the decision-making environment as distributed and asynchronous in nature and involving interdisciplinary and multicultural participants. In order to simplify the description of the domain of interest, the term ‘Transformational Teams’ (TT) is used to represent characteristics of interest. TT is defined by the following characteristics:

• Unstructured, agile teams

• Distributed and asynchronous team member relationships

• Heterogeneous members (multidisciplinary, multicultural, etc.)

• Ad-hoc, naturalistic decision-making (NDM) and problem-solving tasks

• Short duration, high-stress problems

• Uncertainty in source information

• Dynamic information

• Rotating team members.

The science basis of the program is in understanding team cognition and knowledge building/sharing in support of team decision-making. Specific issues include individual and team knowledge construction, development of knowledge interoperability, development of shared awareness and achieving team consensus. Principal military drivers are derived from the need to support new joint and coalition decision-making demands in a defense transformation environment that includes asymmetric warfare challenges (Jensen 2002). In short, the program attempts to integrate the human component into the Defense Department’s Network-Centric Operations (NCO) concept. This will be accomplished by delivering the tools to make human connectivity an integral component in the platforms and sensors that comprise a Network-Centric battlespace. Products of the program include tools that provide the cognitive and computational support for manipulation of knowledge often used in visual displays for decision-making, along with knowledge used to represent and transfer meaning for improved situational awareness for improved team performance in strategic-level decision-making. Examples of operational uses include open source intelligence analysis, Special Operations support, in-route mission analysis and crisis action team support.

Limitations and scope

The focus of the inquiry in this area is from a cognitive perspective. It is recognized, however, that the area is interdisciplinary in nature and in very close alignment with information science as an enabling technology. Further, the program does not focus on classic social and human behavior issues in view of the distributed and asynchronous nature of the problem area. Other associated cognitive-based technologies, including computational human performance models such as ACT-R (Anderson and Matessa 1998) and SOAR (Kennedy and Trafton 2006) are recognized as important tools but are also considered enabling/supporting technologies to address the central problem of team cognition and problem-solving.

Military perspective

From a military perspective, National Defense Policy Transformation from platform-based, large-scale battles to quick reaction, mobile force operations in discrete events has resulted in new challenges in team decision making. Network-Centric Operations policies have been refined, from a Navy perspective, into the FORCEnet concept which requires fully netted situational awareness in a state of the art naval enterprise data network – fully interoperable and seamlessly integrated – to provide information superiority in direct support of the warfighter. Timely responsiveness in this new environment will require a renewed focus on leveraging the ability of human operators to perform complex and collaborative analysis and decision making under severe time constraints (Joint Vision 2010). Characteristics of this new environment include:

• Asymmetric warfare

• Asynchronous and distributed command-level decision-making

• Operations with joint, coalition, non-government and volunteer organization partners

• Dealing with open-source (uncertain, conflicting, partial, non-official) data

• More focus on humanitarian relief, disaster aid and politically-charged operations

• Rapidly changing team members and associated organizational structures

• Culturally diverse partners

• Short turnaround, high stakes, crisis-driven decision-making

• More human interface with agents/automated systems.

Given that these characteristics represent the military environment of the future, the following capabilities will be required:

• Knowledge interoperability among heterogeneous participants

• Conceptual and executable analytical tools to support collaboration

• Language independent, situation-at-a-glance visualization of meaning

• Development of team-shared situational awareness

• Establish teamwork knowledge (common ground and trust)

• Agent interfaces that can react to human variation

• Flexible team/organizational response to workload variation

• explicitly

• Models/computational methods for team naturalistic decision-making

• Cognitive-friendly operator interface with supporting agents.

CKI program thrusts

The program objective is to develop cognitive science-based tools, models, computational methods, and human–agent interfaces to help attain common situational awareness among heterogeneous, distributed team members engaged in asynchronous, quick response collaboration for issue resolution, course-of-action selection or decision-making. The functions are performed in a collaborative team environment with collaborative defined as the cognitive aspects of joint analysis or problem-solving for the purpose of attaining shared understanding sufficient to achieve situational awareness for decision-making or creation of a product. A key component of collaboration is knowledge building, the identification, collection, fusion and presentation of data for the purpose of attaining comprehension of a situation.

The CKI program consists of four principal thrusts:

1. Conversion of data into knowledge – individual and team knowledge development

2. Develop knowledge interoperability – standardized representation of meaning

3. Team shared understanding – mental model convergence

4. Team consensus development – selection and validation of team solution

Individual and team knowledge development

Individual knowledge development is the process of individual team member conversion of data into knowledge about the situation at hand. The process includes collecting, fusing, filtering, representing and displaying (visualizing) knowledge produced in a format that can be shared. Products of this process are often knowledge objects or iconic representations of accumulated knowledge sets. Team knowledge development is defined as all team members participating to clarify information for building common team knowledge. The process includes each team member collecting and internally synthesizing the new team knowledge into their current knowledge structures.

Develop knowledge interoperability

A capability to make knowledge ‘interoperable’, that is, convertible into a format that can be understood by all, including multidisciplinary and multicultural team members. Supporting technology should provide a translation capability to deal with individual personal ontologies and perceptual anchors or, in essence, concept translators. The supporting technology should take advantage of common perceptual sorting processes such as size, color, shape, virtual position, etc.

Develop team shared understanding

The process of reaching team agreement about the characteristics and meaning of the situation at hand within the bounds of the objectives of the collaborative activity (decision-making, intelligence analysis, COA selection, etc.). Not all team members will have equal depth and breadth in all supporting knowledge but each has sufficient knowledge to complete his role as a team member. Key to achieving this capability is the availability of measures and metrics necessary to quantify levels of shared understanding.

Team consensus development

The process of selection and validation of a team solution. Problem solving and solution generation is a key component of team consensus development, which includes the process of creating new ideas and solution alternatives. Possible support tools would help individuals to observe and identify trends and to identify new relationships. Support tools include capabilities for critical thinking, negotiating, brainstorming, creative thinking, sorting and displaying knowledge. During validation of a team solution, analytical and computational tools may be needed to sort and compare aspects of various complex alternatives. Measures of mental model convergence would be required along with advanced voting mechanisms. Tools are also needed to ‘set boundaries’ or to keep deliberation in line with overall objectives and/or constraints of the solution space. Support may also be needed for a ‘what-if’ analysis capability and mental simulation of alternatives/combinations.

Research questions

From the above thrusts arise the following research questions:

• How does asynchronous and distributed activity affect team collaboration – what are useful support tools?

• Can knowledge structures and/or mental models be described/classified/taxonomized?

• What methods are there to develop convention-free repres...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Macrocognition in Teams
• Chapter 2 Empirical Model of Team Collaboration Focus on Macrognition
• Chapter 3 Shared Mental Models and Their Convergence
• Chapter 4 Communication as Team-level Cognitive Processing
• Chapter 5 Collaboration, Training, and Pattern Recognition
• Chapter 6 Toward a Conceptual Model of Common Ground in Teamwork
• Chapter 7 Agents as Collaborating Team Members
• Chapter 8 Transferring Meaning and Developing Cognitive Similarity in Decision-making Teams: Collaboration and Meaning Analysis Process
• Chapter 9 Processes in Complex Team Problem-solving: Parsing and Defining the Theoretical Problem Space
• Chapter 10 Augmenting Video to Share Situation Awareness More Effectively in a Distributed Team
• Chapter 11 EWall: A Computational System for Investigating and Supporting Cognitive and Collaborative Sense-making Processes
• Chapter 12 DCODE: A Tool for Knowledge Transfer, Conflict Resolution and Consensus-building in Teams
• Chapter 13 Modeling Cultural and Organizational Factors of Multinational Teams
• Chapter 14 CENTER: Critical Thinking in Team Decision-making
• Chapter 15 Measuring Situation Awareness through Automated Communication Analysis
• Chapter 16 Converging Approaches to Automated Communications-based Assessment of Team Situation Awareness
• Chapter 17 Shared Lightweight Annotation TEchnology (SLATE) for Special Operations Forces
• Chapter 18 JIGSAW – Joint Intelligence Graphical Situation Awareness Web for Collaborative Intelligence Analysis
• Chapter 19 The Collaboration Advizor Tool: A Tool to Diagnose and Fix Team Cognitive Problems
• Chapter 20 Collaborative Operational and Research Environment (CORE): A Collaborative Testbed and Tool Suite for Asynchronous Collaboration
• Chapter 21 Plug-and-Play Testbed for Collaboration in the Global Information Grid
• Chapter 22 Naturalistic Decision-making Based Collaboration Scenarios
• Chapter 23 Macrocognition Research: Challenges and Opportunities on the Road Ahead
• Index