The aim was to test the value of shared gaze as a way to improve team performance in a visual monitoring task.
Background
Teams outperform individuals in monitoring tasks, but fall short of achievable levels. Shared-gaze displays offer a potential method of improving team efficiency. Within a shared-gaze arrangement, operators collaborate on a visual task, and each team member’s display includes a cursor to represent the other teammates’ point of regard. Past work has suggested that shared gaze allows operators to better communicate and coordinate their attentional scanning in a visual search task. The current experiments sought to replicate and extend earlier findings of inefficient team performance in a visual monitoring task, and asked whether shared gaze would improve team efficiency.
Method
Participants performed a visual monitoring task framed as a sonar operation. Displays were matrices of luminance patches varying in intensity. The participants’ task was to monitor for occasional critical signals, patches of high luminance. In Experiment 1, pairs of participants performed the task independently, or working as teams. In Experiment 2, teams of two participants performed the task with or without shared-gaze displays.
Results
In Experiment 1, teams detected more critical signals than individuals, but were statistically inefficient; detection rates were lower than predicted by a control model that assumed pairs of operators searching in isolation. In Experiment 2, shared gaze failed to increase target detection rates.
Conclusion and application
Operators collaborate inefficiently in visual monitoring tasks, and shared gaze does not improve their performance.
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