Measuring team cognition in collaborative systems integrative and interdisciplinary perspectives

This chapter describes a program of research using the living laboratory framework that extended team cognition research into previously unexplored avenues. First, we simultaneously investigated multiple types of team cognition (information sharing, shared situation awareness (SA), and team mental models). Second, we infused a temporal focus (deadlines, pacing, and sequencing) into the study of team cognition and outcomes to more realistically mirror, organizational, and military team contexts. Third, we investigated the effectiveness of various interventions (storytelling, team reflexivity, and individual reflexivity) designed to enhance team cognition in distributed teams. Across four programmatic experimental studies, research questions were tested via three-person student teams performing NeoCITIES, a scaled-world simulation. Incorporating temporality into the study of team mental models (TMMs) proved fruitful in predicting unique variance beyond traditional teamwork- and taskwork-content domains.