Communication and Shared Mental Models for Teams Performing Interdependent Tasks

摘要

Research shows that performance of human teams improves when members have a shared understanding of their task; that is, when teams develop and use a shared mental model (SMM). An SMM can contain different types of information or components and this paper investigates the influence on team performance of sharing different components. We consider two components of an SMM: intentions (e.g. goals) and world knowledge (e.g. beliefs) and investigate which component(s) contribute most to team performance across different forms of interdependent tasks. We performed experiments using a Blocks World for Team (BW4T) testbed for artificial agent teams and our results show that with high levels of interdependence in tasks, communicating intentions contributes most to team performance, while for low levels of interdependence, communicating world knowledge contributes more. Additionally, as is the case with human teams, higher sharedness correlated with improved team performance for the artificial agent teams. These insights can assist in the design of communication protocols that improves team performance when team members are engaged in interdependent tasks and help design artificial agents that can communicate effectively when working with humans as team mates.