Nancy J. Cooke

From battle plans to football plays: Extending military team cognition to football

Abstract One area of focus for the sport sciences is on the improvement of team process and performance. The analogies and similarities between military command‐andcontrol and American football serve as a useful bridge in which human factors, military, and industrial/organizational psychologist can share their findings in team process and performance with the sports sciences. The Cognitive Engineering on Team Tasks Laboratory (CERTT) has approached this problem with the development of a synthetic test‐bed replicating unmanned aerial vehicle command‐and‐control coordination in the lab. Results from the lab in the areas of performance, process, holistic vs. aggregative methods, training, and communication and skill retention are used to suggest future directions in improving team performance in football

20. Acquiring Team-Level Command and Control Skill for UAV Operation

The heart of the CERTT Laboratory, shown in Fig. 1, is a flexible Synthetic Task Environment (STE) that is designed to study many different synthetic tasks for teams working in complex environments. STEs provide an ideal environment for the study of team cognition in complex settings by providing a middle-ground between the highly artificial tasks commonly found in laboratories and the often uncontrollable conditions found in the field or high fidelity simulations.

Changes in team composition after a break: Building adapative command-and-control teams

An experiment exploring the effects of team composition on the acquisition and retention of team performance and cognitive skill is reported. Team performance was measured in the context of photographing ground targets in an unmanned aerial vehicle synthetic task environment. Team process was taken as a measure of team cognition. Experimental results include the findings that team mixing and longer retention intervals have a short lived deleterious effect on team performance immediately after the interval, while team mixing has a positive effect on team process after the interval. These findings suggest that changes in team composition and retention interval can lead to improvements in team cognition if a brief decrement in team performance post-interval can be afforded. These results are interpreted as perturbation of established coordination patterns due to team mixing leading to more flexible and adaptive teams. Implications for process-oriented research are also considered.

2. UAV Human Factors: Operator Perspectives

The Cognitive Engineering Research Institutes First Annual Human Factors of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) Workshop, held on May 24–25, 2004 in Chandler Arizona, and Second Annual Human Factors of UAVs Workshop, held on May 25–26, 2005 in Mesa Arizona, brought to light many human factors issues regarding the technology and operation of UAVs. An integral part of the event was the involvement of military UAV operators from the U.S. Air Force (USAF), U.S. Navy, and U.S. Army. The involvement of UAV operators in the workshops was valuable in linking developers and human factors researchers in the improvement of UAV systems and operations – a practice that is too often implemented only after a system is deployed and the problems are found. The experience of operators serves as a “users account” of the issues and problems concerning the operation of UAVs. The fact that operators have had first hand experience in operating UAVs provides a unique perspective to the problem of identifying the most pressing human factors issues. The purpose of this chapter is to highlight the perspectives of two UAV operators that helped to set the tone for the entire First Annual Human Factors of UAVs Workshop.

Human factors guidelines for developing collaborative intelligence analysis technologies

Intelligence analysis is changing in its the breadth and scope, bringing forth many new problems and challenges. Problems are increasing in volume, scope, and context. In response to changes, new technologies and the utilization of teams to conduct analysis have become imperative. Yet, though both are individually perceived as important, less consideration is given to collaborative technologies in intelligence analysis. More specifically, there is limited understanding of how to develop and design them in a meaningful and impactful way for the analysts. In this paper, through a review of the literature, our own work, and anecdotal reports from subject matter experts, we outline multiple human factors guidelines that are beneficial in studying and designing collaborative intelligence analysis technologies and tools. We conclude by highlighting multiple challenges specific to developing collaborative technologies in intelligence analysis.

A metric for the shared interpretation of commander's intent

An enduring challenge in management and in military command is ensuring that subordinates select actions as their leader would, particularly when circumstances change unexpectedly. An experiment was conducted to test a measure of shared interpretation of commanders intent and its effects on the adaptability of subordinates. Performance was measured in the context of a simulated law enforcement task. A course of action ranking procedure was used as a measure of interpretation of intent with rank order correlation reflecting shared interpretation. The study validates a measure of shared interpretation of commanders intent and supports the hypothesis that making values explicit enhances shared interpretation and adaptability. The findings indicate that when missions change in unexpected ways, a commanders intent statement that presents the values by which actions are to be prioritized produces greater agreement between commander and subordinates on action preferences than do intent statements that prescribe command preference for specific actions.

Investigating Team Coordination in Baseball Using a Novel Joint Decision Making Paradigm

A novel joint decision making paradigm for assessing team coordination was developed and tested using baseball infielders. Balls launched onto an infield at different trajectories were filmed using four video cameras that were each placed at one of the typical positions of the four infielders. Each participant viewed temporally occluded videos for one of the four positions and were asked to say either “ball” if they would attempt to field it or the name of the bag that they would cover. The evaluation of two experienced coaches was used to assign a group coordination score for each trajectory and group decision times were calculated. Thirty groups of 4 current college baseball players were: (i) teammates (players from same team/view from own position), (ii) non-teammates (players from different teams/view from own position), or (iii) scrambled teammates (players from same team/view not from own position). Teammates performed significantly better (i.e., faster and more coordinated decisions) than the other two groups, whereas scrambled teammates performed significantly better than non-teammates. These findings suggest that team coordination is achieved through both experience with one’s teammates’ responses to particular events (e.g., a ball hit up the middle) and one’s own general action capabilities (e.g., running speed). The sensitivity of our joint decision making paradigm to group makeup provides support for its use as a method for studying team coordination.

The Synthetic Teammate as a Team Player in Command-and-Control Teams

Project overview. The current project is part of a larger effort that focuses on Human-Automation Teaming (HAT) interaction in the context of the development, integration, and validation of a computational cognitive model that acts as a full-fledged synthetic teammate for a three-agent Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) ground control crew. Our most recent effort looked at team process and team performance within the HAT. In order to be considered a team player, the synthetic teammate must be able to communicate and coordinate with its human teammates and do so in a subtle manner (Demir et al., 2016). In this task, there were three different and interdependent team members: 1) Air Vehicle Operator (AVO) – controls the UAS’s heading, altitude, and airspeed; 2) Data Exploitation, Mission Planning, and Communications (DEMPC) – provides a dynamic flight plan as well as speed and altitude restrictions; and 3) Payload Operator (PLO) – monitors sensor equipment, negotiates with the AVO, and takes photographs of target waypoints. The communication within a three-agent UAS team occurred over a text-based communications system. In this research, there were three conditions which are differentiated by the AVO role: 1) the Synthetic - the synthetic teammate was assigned the AVO role; 2) the Control - the AVO was an inexperienced human participant; 3) the Experimenter - the AVO was one of the experimenters who was experienced with the task. The experimenter AVO asked questions of other team members to ensure timely and adaptive passing of information at target waypoints. In this current study, the coordination among the team members occurs at each target waypoint and requires a specific sequence of information passing for an optimum team performance (Cooke, Gorman, Duran, & Taylor, 2007): the information is provided by the DEMPC about the upcoming target waypoint to the AVO. After that, the PLO and the AVO negotiate regarding an appropriate altitude and airspeed for the target waypoints about required camera settings. Finally, the PLO sends feedback to other team members about the status of the target photo. Method. Activities during this period included conducting an experiment to: 1) evaluate the synthetic teammate’s performance, and the HAT team performance in comparison to all human teams, 2) understand how team process differs between all human and human-synthetic teams and how this impacts performance, and 3) compare the human-synthetic teams and all human control teams to a team with a pilot that is experienced in pushing and pulling information across the team. For this experiment, participants were randomly assigned for the duration of the experiment. Within each of the five missions, teams were told to obtain as many “good” photos as possible while avoiding alarms and rule violations in less than 40 minutes. The overall focus of this paper is: team process that is comprised of eight verbal behaviors associated with team effectiveness; team performance that is a combination of mission variables, including the rate of successful target photographs, time spent in alarm and warning states (for each individual), and the critical waypoint acquisition rate; and target processing efficiency took into account the time spent inside a target waypoint to get a good photo. Results and discussion. In general, findings indicate that synthetic AVOs perform more poorly than control AVOs in terms of team performance. Synthetic teams perform as well at the mission level as control teams. However, in terms of target processing efficiency, synthetic teams perform poorer than control teams. In terms of team process, synthetic teams demonstrate interaction patterns corresponding to more pulling of information than pushing with little change over time. In summary, these results indicate that there is a strong potential for using synthetic team member as a teammate in real world tasks and for training.

22. Guiding the Design of a Deployable UAV Operations Cell

Todays battlespace is a very complex system of humans and technology. It could be thought of as a system of layers – where there might be a layer of ground operations and a layer of air operations. Within the air operations layer exists two additional layers of manned air operations and unmanned air operations. If you peel back all layers of todays battlespace and just view the “unmanned air operations” layer, you will find another complex system of humans and technology working as just one element of the overall system. This system of uninhabited air operations might consist of different types of uninhabited air vehicles (e.g., Predator, Hunter, etc.) performing different types of missions (e.g., Intelligence, Reconnaissance, Surveillance-IRS; IRS-strike; search and rescue, etc.).

Understanding the Successful Coordination of Team Behavior

In many areas of human life, people perform in teams. These teams’ performances depend, at least partly, on team members’ abilities to coordinate their contributions effectively. This includes the making of decisions and the regulation of behavior in reference to the framework provided by the social group- and task-context. Given the high relevance of a deepened and integrated understanding about the mechanisms underlying coordinated team behavior, the aim of this research topic is to provide a platform for different theoretical and methodological approaches to researching and understanding coordinated team behavior in different task contexts. The articles published in this edition offer a multifaceted insight into current work on the topic.