Coordinated Awareness of Situation by Teams (CAST): Measuring Team Situation Awareness of a Communication Glitch

Abstract

A coordination-based measure of team situation awareness is presented and contrasted with knowledge-based measurement. The measure is applied to team awareness of a communication channel failure (glitch) during a simulated unmanned air vehicle reconnaissance experiment. Experimental results are reported, including the findings that not all team members should be identically aware of the glitch and that appropriate levels of coordination are an important precursor of team situation awareness. The results are discussed in terms of the application of coordination metrics to support the understanding of team situation awareness. The use of team coordination as a low-dimension variable of team functionality is scalable over a variety of team sizes and expertise distributions.

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