Interactive Team Cognition for Humans & Machines

Nancy Cooke, Professor, Human Systems Engineering, ASU, The Polytechnic School

Interactive Team Cognition for Humans and Machines

A team is a heterogeneous group of team members, each with their own roles and responsibilities who come together to achieve a common goal. Team cognition is the joint processing of information by a team that produces knowledge and actions, beyond what an individual could produce. In this talk I will report on team cognition research that I have conducted in my lab over the last 28 years leading to the theory of Interactive Team Cognition and four discoveries that include: the importance of team interaction; the use of perturbations to improve team cognition; what it takes to be a good team player; and the power of a single teammate or coordination coaching. In addition, I will suggest some future directions for this work that include a focus on team-level measurement and extension of team cognition to human, artificial intelligence, and robot teaming.

Nancy J. Cooke is a professor in Human Systems Engineering at the Polytechnic School, one of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. She is also Senior Scientific Advisor of the Global Security Initiative’s Center for Human, AI, and Robot Teaming. Professor Cooke’s research interests include the study of individual and team cognition and its application to the development of cognitive and knowledge engineering methodologies, remotely piloted aircraft systems, human-robot teaming, healthcare systems, and emergency response systems. She specializes in the development, application, and evaluation of methodologies to elicit and assess individual and team cognition. Ongoing projects in her group include coordination of human-autonomy teams in the face of unexpected events, Human-Robot Teaming and Situation Awareness, and Human-Machine Teaming for Next Generation Combat Vehicle, Artificial Social Intelligence. Her work is funded by DoD and has been widely published.