Team Coordination and Dynamics

Abstract

When people coordinate as a team, they accomplish more than they would working alone. These team-coordination effects give new meaning to Aristotle's famous phrase, "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." In this article, I consider two central issues confronting team-coordination research: Do the causes of team coordination reside within individual minds or between them, and at what levels of analysis (e.g., physiological, cognitive) do team-coordination effects occur? These issues are viewed in light of specific lines of coordination research, and some features of a general theory of team coordination are offered.

Experimental control of scaling behavior: what is not fractal?

“…To address that possibility, we repeated the DFA procedure on all time series but modified the algorithm. Before calculating scaling exponents, we employed an algorithm to detect an inflection point in those curves (e.g., Gorman et al 2010;Treffner and Kelso 1999). The algorithm is summarized as follows: First, we fit a regression line to the entire range of logl.…”

“…There are examples of fractals in physiology (e.g., Goldberger et al 2002;Ivanov et al 2001;Papo 2013;Peng et al 1994Peng et al , 2002; intraperson behavior (Aks et al 2002;Delignières et al 2008;Gilden et al 1995;Gilden 2001Gilden , 2009Ihlen and Vereijken 2010;Kello et al 2007;Torre et al 2007;Torre and Wagenmakers 2009;Anastas et al 2011;Valdez and Amazeen 2008, 2010Van Orden et al 2003); interperson behavior (e.g., Fine et al 2015;Gorman et al 2010;Likens et al 2014;Marmelat and Delignières 2012); and countless other non-human processes (Bak 1997;Mandelbrot 1983;Solé and Goodwin 2000). Thus, it is no wonder that some researchers investigating fractal phenomena use words like "ubiquitous" (Van Orden et al 2003;Van Orden 2010) and "pervasive" (Kello et al 2008) in favor of "idiosyncratic" (Torre and Wagenmakers 2009).…”

“…1993; Fine et al 2015;Gorman et al 2010;Ihlen and Vereijken 2010;Likens et al 2014;Marmelat and Delignières 2012;Marmelat et al 2014;Valdez and Amazeen 2008, 2010Van Orden et al 2003). Such demonstrations have led to potentially fruitful hypotheses and applications.…”

“…Such demonstrations have led to potentially fruitful hypotheses and applications. For example, some authors have suggested that fractal variability tends to be associated with adaptability in the physiological and psychological domains (e.g., Collins and DeLuca 1993;Gorman et al 2010;Ivanov et al 2001;Likens et al 2014;Peng et al 1994;Van Orden et al 2003). Others have argued that fractals emerge when behavior is unfettered by overbearing task constraints (Kloos and Van Orden 2009;Van Orden et al 2003).…”

Shared Mental Models in Support of Adaptive Instruction for Teams Using the GIFT Tutoring Architecture

“…They concluded that these models were the Bknowledge structures held by members of a team that enable them to form accurate explanations and expectations for the task, and in turn, to coordinate their actions and adapt their behavior to demands of the task and other team members^(p. 228). More recently Cooke et al (2012) and Gorman (2014) have emphasized that these mental models should not be viewed as property or products, but as dynamic cognitive activities rooted in team member interactions and a meaningful context. Given this understanding of shared mental models as complex, dynamic processes begins to suggest the need for machine intelligence, such as that found in ITSs, to provide adaptive instruction for teams.…”