Team collaboration involves many operational tasks such as team decision-making or course of action selection, developing shared understanding, and intelligence analysis. These operational tasks must be performed in many situations, often under severe time pressure, with information and knowledge uncertainty, large amounts of dynamic information and across different team characteristics. Recent research in this area has focused on various aspects of human collaborative decision-making and the underlying cognitive processes while describing those processes at different levels of detail, making it difficult to compare research results. The theoretical construct of ‘macrocognition in teams’ was developed to facilitate cognitive research in team collaboration, which will enable a common level of understanding when defining, measuring and discussing the cognitive processes in team collaboration. Macrocognition is defined as both the internalized and externalized mental processes employed by team members in complex, one-of-a-kind, collaborative problem solving. Macrocognition in Teams provides readers with a greater understanding of the macrocognitive processes which support collaborative team activity, showcasing current research, theories, methodologies and tools. It will be of direct relevance to academics, researchers and practitioners interested in group/team interaction, performance, development and training.

Team collaboration involves many operational tasks such as team decision-making or course of action selection, developing shared understanding, and intelligence analysis. These operational tasks must be performed in many situations, often under severe time pressure, with information and knowledge uncertainty, large amounts of dynamic information and across different team characteristics. Recent research in this area has focused on various aspects of human collaborative decision-making and the underlying cognitive processes while describing those processes at different levels of detail, making it difficult to compare research results. The theoretical construct of ’macrocognition in teams’ was developed to facilitate cognitive research in team collaboration, which will enable a common level of understanding when defining, measuring and discussing the cognitive processes in team collaboration. Macrocognition is defined as both the internalized and externalized mental processes employed by team members in complex, one-of-a-kind, collaborative problem solving. Macrocognition in Teams provides readers with a greater understanding of the macrocognitive processes which support collaborative team activity, showcasing current research, theories, methodologies and tools. It will be of direct relevance to academics, researchers and practitioners interested in group/team interaction, performance, development and training.

Macrocognition Metrics and Scenarios: Design and Evaluation for Real-World Teams translates advances by scientific leaders in the relatively new area of macrocognition into a format that will support immediate use by members of the software testing and evaluation community for large-scale systems as well as trainers of real-world teams. Macrocognition is defined as how activity in real-world teams is adapted to the complex demands of a setting with high consequences for failure. The primary distinction between macrocognition and prior research is that the primary unit for measurement is a real-world team coordinating their activity, rather than individuals processing information, the predominant model for cognition for decades. This book provides an overview of the theoretical foundations of macrocognition, describes a set of exciting new macrocognitive metrics, and provides guidance on using the metrics in the context of different approaches to evaluation and measurement of real-world teams.

The increasing complexity of work systems and changes in the nature of workplace technology over the past century have resulted in an exponential shift in the nature of work activities, from physical labor to cognitive work. Modern work systems have many characteristics that make them cognitively complex: They can be highly interactive; comprised of multiple agents and artifacts; information may be limited and distributed across space and time; task goals are frequently ill-defined, conflicting, dynamic and emergent; planning may only be possible at general levels of abstraction or require adaptive solutions; some degree of proficiency or expertise is required; the stakes are often high; and uncertainty, time-constraints and stress are seldom absent. To complicate matters further, cognition in complex work settings is typically constrained by broader professional, organizational, and institutional practice and policy. These features of cognitive work present significant challenges to scientific methodology and theory, and subsequent design of reliable interventions. Historically, philosophers and scientists have attempted to understand the mental activities experienced during cognitive work at multiple levels of analysis using divergent methods. Some have examined cognition at an associative, contextual, functional or holistic level, relying on naturalistic methods to understand the higher mental processes as they work in harmony during goal-directed behavior. Others have embraced experimental methods and favored internal over external validity, often reducing cognition to a psychology of fundamental acts, such as short-term memory access with millisecond shifts in attention. More recently, Macrocognition has evolved as a complementary paradigm. Macrocognitive researchers have studied the cognitive functions and processes associated with skilled, adaptive, collaborative, and resilient cognitive work in the context of the aforementioned complexities of psychotechnical and sociotechnical work systems. Typically, this research has been carried out using cognitive task analytic techniques that draw on both naturalistic and (quasi-)experimental methods. The primary goals of research in Macrocognition are to better understand cognitive adaptations to complexity, to increase our theoretical understanding of the organism-environment relations by studying the mapping between cognitive work and real-world demands, and to promote use-inspired research capable of improving system performance.

Cognitive processes in teams have been a valuable arena for team researchers to explore. Team cognition research advances and informs a variety of disciplines, including cognitive and social sciences, engineering, military science, organizational science, human factors, medicine, and communications. There has been a great deal of progress in the team cognition literature, yet the field is still in its early stages of maturity. There is much more to be gained from the field’s insights and there is a need to unite the diverse array of scholarly ideas that permeate the field. This movement will serve to organize the research and ideas that have surfaced in the field, thereby making them more accessible to different disciplines while at the same time, motivating continued progress in the field. This book aims to be a step in this direction and acts as a forum for leading scholars to share their ideas, theories, models, and conceptions about what matters and where more attention is needed in the field of team cognition.

This book presents the latest work in the area of naturalistic decision making (NDM) and its extension into the area of macrocognition. It contains 18 chapters relating research centered on the study of expertise in naturalistic settings, written by international experts in NDM and cognitive systems engineering. The objective of the book is to present the reader with exciting new developments in this field of research, which is characterized by its application-oriented focus. The work addresses only real-world problems and issues. For instance, how do multi-national teams collaborate effectively? How can surgeons best be supported by technology? How do detectives make sense of complex criminal cases? In all instances the studies have been carried out on experts within their respective domains. The traditional field of NDM is extended in this work by focusing on macrocognitive functions other than decision making, namely sense-making, coordination and planning. This has broadened the scope of the field. The book also contains a theoretical discussion of the macro-micro distinction. Naturalistic Decision Making and Macrocognition will be relevant to graduate students, researchers and professionals (including professionals and researchers in business, industry and government) who are interested in decision making, expertise, training methods and system design. The material may be used in two ways: theoretically, to advance understanding of the field of naturalistic decision making; and practically, to gain insight into how experts in various domains solve particular problems, understand and deal with issues and collaborate with others.