Rapid Assessment of Team Cognitive Readiness

Defense transformation and network-centric operations have created the need for highly-agile, networked teams of individuals who are responsive to the changing demands of their task environment. Lack of preparedness for new stimulation when teams process novel or uncertain task demands is the team refractory period, a measure of team cognitive readiness. Team cognitive readiness is a multilevel construct, with dynamic interconnections across neural, behavioral, and cognitive levels of analysis. There exists a challenge for measuring team cognitive readiness and developing feedback for supervisory entities (man or machine) to increase team effectiveness and responsiveness to new stimulation. In Phase I we will use principles and methods of nonlinear dynamics to capture the complexity of team cognitive readiness across neural and cognitive levels of analysis. Our dynamical solutions formulate prediction models that drive a suite of team cognitive readiness gauges in real time. The feasibility of discriminating between teams with low cognitive readiness who are processing novel, uncertain events vs. teams who are processing nominal events will be demonstrated in Phase I. We will develop a prototype gauge cluster to provide team cognitive readiness feedback at neural and cognitive levels of analysis on individuals and the team as a whole.