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The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of team size, communication modality, and team role on measures of team process over time. As the use of semiautonomous, unmanned vehicles increases, it is pertinent to investigate issues associated with the human teams that will control them, including consideration of team roles and the design of systems to support these roles. Using a 1:35 scale facility for military operations in urban terrain, distributed teams of two or three operators used a simulated, unmanned aerial vehicle and a scaled, unmanned ground vehicle to complete two distinct phases of a mission. The teams used either audio or instant messaging for communication, and the analysis of communication assessed their discussion of target identification, target classification, object localization, and vehicle navigation. Findings indicate that the addition of a third teammate resulted in greater role specificity, and the use of audio increased communication of task-relevant content. The proper assignment of team roles can improve the ability of a team to both acquire and synthesize information from remote environments. Furthermore, proper system design can improve the flow of information between teammates over time.

The U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) Autonomous Systems Enterprise has a vision for the future of effective Soldierrobot teaming. Our research program focuses on three primary thrust areas: communications, teaming, and shared cognition.Here we discuss a recent study in communications, where we collected data using a multimodal interface comprised of speech, gesture, touch and a visual display to command a robot to perform semantically-based tasks. Observations on usability and participant expectations with respect to the interaction with the robot were obtained. Initial observations are reported, showing that the speech-gesture-visual multimodal interface was liked and performed well. Areas for improvement were noted.

Knowledge elicitation and mental model assessment methods are becoming increasingly popular in applied psychology. However, there continue to be questions about the psychometrics of knowledge elicitation methods. Specifically, more needs to be known regarding the stability and consistency of the results over time (i.e., whether the methods are reliable) and regarding the degree to which the results correctly represent the underlying knowledge structures (i.e., whether the methods are valid).This paper focuses on the convergence among three different assessment methods: (a) pairwise relatedness ratings using Pathfinder, (b) concept mapping, and (c) card sorting. Thirty-six participants completed all three assessments using the same set of twenty driving-related terms. Assessment sequences were counterbalanced, and participants were randomly assigned to one of the six assessment sequences. It was found that the three assessment methods showed very low convergence as measured by the average correlation across the three methods within the same person. Indeed, convergence was lower than the sharedness across participants (as measured by the average correlation across participants within the same assessment method). Additionally, there were order effects among the different assessment sequences. Implications for research and practice are discussed.