Experiment in Collaborative Team Decision Making in Complex Information Processing Environments

摘要

This research was conducted to understand whether complex information processing affects team performance. Specifically, information monitoring complexity was analyzed. The study used both subjective and objective measures. The subjective measures assess team effects in terms of team situation awareness (SA) and team informity (information sharing). The objective measures of signal sensitivity (d's;), time and accuracy, and detection time were used to analyze effects of task performance on the signal detection. There was no difference between the teams used in the study with respect to how they reported seeing the same thing (team SA) and team informity. For the team with 3 members, the distributions of the mean percentages of team SA tend to follow exponentially decreasing function (negative slopes) as the number of signal presented increases. The team with 5 members reported more team SA. It is not clear from these results whether teams with more members tend to identify more signals than teams with less number of members. It is possible that signal complexity and signal timing control may interact to affect signal monitoring performance-which in turn affects the way people report what they see under stress. The mean detection accuracy was more pronounced at signal timing control of 10-15 sec. Generally, the results show that signal complexity and signal timing control have effect on the dependent measures. The teams did not show any indication of differences in signal detection time.