Human Factors Aspects of Team Cognition

Teams think. That is, they assess the situation, plan, solve prob-lems, design, and make decisions as an integrated unit. We refer to these collaborative thinking activities as team cognition. Why is team cognition important? A growing number of tasks take place in the context of complex sociotechnical sys-tems. The cognitive requirements associated with emergency response, software development, transportation, factory and power plant operation, military operations, medicine, and a va-riety of other tasks exceed the limits of individual cognition. Teams are a natural solution to this problem, and so the empha-sis on teams in these domains is increasing. Since team tasks are widely varied, it follows that human factors applications involving team cognition are also widely varied. Of particular relevance to the topic of this book are the numerous software applications that involve collaborative ac