Using Team Communication to Understand Team Cognition in Distributed vs. Co-Located Mission Environments

Abstract

This report documents a 30-month effort sponsored by the Office of Naval Research that refined, applied and evaluated methods for analyzing the communication flow and content surrounding collaboration. The methods include four measures of communication content based on Latent Semantic Analysis and five methods that extract patterns in communication flow. Communication analysis methods were applied to the communication data from two studies in the context of a three-person Unmanned Aerial Vehicle ground control simulation. In the studies workload and geographic dispersion were manipulated and team performance, process, team situation awareness, and shared mental models were measured. Communication analysis methods were evaluated in terms of their ability to predict team performance in a consistent manner across studies. All methods, with the exception of the Process Surrogate flow-based method, were validated by these criteria. Barriers to full automation of the methods and generalization to different domains were identified with proposed solutions. Application of the communication analysis methods revealed that high performing teams developed stable, consistent patterns of communicating which could be contrasted to teams that were distributed, under high workload, or facing a communication malfunction which were characterized by variable, yet flexible and adaptive communication patterns. Findings led to an ecological perspective on team cognition, as well as new methods for assessing team situation awareness and team coordination that are inspired by this perspective. The methods can be applied to better understand collaboration or to assess collaboration in order to evaluate tools or techniques purported to enhance collaboration.