Addressing Limitations of the Measurement of Team Cognition

Abstract

Team cognition is more than the sum of the cognition of the individual team members. Instead, it emerges from the interplay of individual cognition and team process behaviors. Team cognition has been implicated as a major factor underlying team performance and thus, its measurement is critical for team training and design. Measures of team cognition, however, are limited in a number of ways. For instance, measures are taken at an individual level and aggregated, rather than pursuing data collection at the more holistic level of the team. Further, measures do not capture the heterogeneous knowledge backgrounds of team members. We have begun to address these and other limitations by developing new measures and applying them in four studies of team performance in military synthetic task environments. We highlight the results of these studies, which support the validity of our measures of taskwork knowledge, teamwork knowledge, and team situation awareness.