COGNITIVE DYNAMICS OF DISTRIBUTED TEAMS PERFORMING DYNAMIC, COMPLEX TASKS

Traditional team training is conducted by physically co-locating students and accessing a common system. This method of training involves bringing the entire team to where the system is located. This can be made more efficient by allowing students to remotely access these systems from their duty station. However, the effects of conducting training in this distributed manner have not been investigated. This study identifies task and cognitive performance decrements of distributed teams. Teams of three people were trained on a complex, dynamic task and performed several scenarios. The key variable of interest was whether teams were seated next to each other (co-located) or were in separate spaces (distributed). Task performance metrics were collected, along with measures of workload, communications, and team cohesion. Results demonstrate that all teams had similar mission outcomes, but distributed teams reported higher team workload, lower group integration, and increased communications. This suggests that the act of distributing a team will impact training, but these impacts may not all be negative. Improvements to distributed training environments should be developed to increase performance and reduce workload in distributed teams