文档介绍：An Ecological Perspective on Team Cognition
Nancy J. Cooke 1,2, Jamie C. Gorman 1,3, and Leah J. Rowe 1,2
Cognitive Engineering Research Institute1
Arizona State University2
New Mexico State University3
Contact:
Nancy J. Cooke
CERI
5810 S. Sossaman
Mesa, AZ 85212
480-988-2173 (office)
480-988-3162 (fax)
An Ecological Perspective on Team Cognition
Why Team Cognition?
Technology plicated the role of the human in plex systems. Manual or motor tasks carried out by a single individual have been supplanted by multiple-person tasks that are highly cognitive in nature. Assembly lines have been replaced by teams of designers, troubleshooters, and process controllers. Teams plan, decide, remember, make decisions, design, trouble shoot, solve problems, and generally think as an integrated unit. These activities are examples of team cognition, a construct that has arisen with the growing need to understand, explain, and predict these cognitive activities of teams. But does team cognition mean that teams think or is it that the individuals within the teams think, relegating team cognition to a collection of individual thinkers? Questions like these are important prerequisites to understanding team cognition.
But why focus on team cognition? Just as applied psychologists have linked individual cognition to individual performance (Durso, Nickerson, Schvaneveldt, Dumais, Chi, & Lindsay, 1999) team cognition has been linked to team performance. The idea is that a great number of team performance deficiencies or errors plex cognitive systems can be attributed to problems with team cognition. There are many notable examples supporting this claim. Team decision making and coordination failures are at least partially tied to the Vincennes–Iranian airbus incident of 1988 (Collyer & Malecki, 1998), the Challenger disaster in 1986 (Vaughan, 1996), and recent failures anizational response to Hurricane Katrina (CNN, 2005). A better understanding of team cognition and its rela