RESUMEN

Fluid teams are teams that are rapidly assembled from across disciplines or areas of expertise to address a near-term problem. They are typically composed of individuals who have no prior familiarity with one another, who as a team must begin work immediately, and who disband at the completion of the task. Prior research has noted the challenges posed by this unique type of team context. To date, fluid teams have been understudied, yet their relevance and application in the modern workplace is expanding. This Perspective article presents a concise overview of critical research gaps and opportunities to support selection, training, and workplace design for fluid teams.

RESUMEN

Semantic alignment is a key process underlying interpersonal and team communication. However, semantic similarity is difficult to quantify, and statistical approaches designed to measure it often rely on methods that make the identification of the relative importance of key words difficult. This study outlines how conceptual recurrence analysis (CRA) can address these issues and can be used to detect conceptual structure in interpersonal communication. We developed several novel CRA metrics to analyze communication data reported previously by Mancuso, Finomore, Rahill, Blair, and Funke (Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 58, 405-409, 2014), gathered from teams who worked cooperatively on a logic puzzle under different cognitive biasing contexts. CRA, like other measures of semantic coordination, relies on parameters whose values affect estimates of semantic alignment. We evaluated how the dimensionality of semantic spaces affects metrics quantifying the conceptual similarity of communicative exchanges, and whether metrics calculated from top-down, a priori semantic spaces or bottom-up semantic spaces empirically derived from each data set were more sensitive to biasing context. We found that the novel CRA measures were sensitive to manipulations of cognitive bias, and that higher-dimensional, bottom-up semantic spaces generally yielded more sensitivity to the experimental manipulations, though when the communication was evaluated with respect to specific key concepts, lower-dimensional, top-down spaces performed nearly as well. We conclude that CRA is sensitive to experimental manipulations in ways consistent with prior findings and that it presents a customizable framework for testing predictions about interpersonal communication patterns and other linguistic exchanges.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

The present study investigated how constraining movement affects interpersonal coordination and joint cognitive performance. Pairs of participants worked cooperatively to solve picture-puzzle tasks in which they conversed to identify differences between pictures in 3 degree-of-constraint conditions: both participants were free to move their hands (free-free; FF); both participants' hands were restrained (restrained-restrained; RR); and the hands of 1 participant were free while the hands of the other participant were restrained (free-restrained; FR). Eye tracking data were collected, and movement was measured at the waist, hand, and head. Data were analyzed using Cross-Recurrence Quantification Analysis (CRQ). Postural sway coordination, gaze coordination, and task performance were predicted to be highest in FF, followed by RR, and then by FR. Results showed the asymmetric FR condition generally exhibited lesser degrees of coordination than the symmetric Conditions FF and RR, and that the patterning of coordination in the symmetric conditions varied across the measured body segments. These results demonstrate that movement restraints affect not only interpersonal postural coordination, but also joint attention. Additionally, significant positive relationships were found between task performance and total amount of anterior-posterior movement measured at the head, hand and waist; number of utterances; and number of differences pairs found in the puzzles. These findings indicate a relationship between movement and task performance consistent with the hypotheses that both interpersonal coordination and cognitive performance are sensitive to local action constraints.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

Bingham et al. discovered a perceptible affordance property, composed of a relation between object weight and size, used to select optimal objects for long-distance throwing. Subsequent research confirmed this finding, but disconfirmed a hypothesis formulated by Bingham et al. about the information used to perceive the affordance. Following this, Zhu and Bingham investigated the possibility that optimal objects for throwing are selected as having a particular felt heaviness. The results supported this hypothesis. Perceived heaviness exhibits the size-weight illusion: to be perceived as equally heavy, larger objects must weigh more than smaller ones. Amazeen and Turvey showed that heaviness perception is determined by rotational inertia. We investigated whether rotational inertia would determine both perceived heaviness and throw-ability when spherical objects were held in the hand and wielded about the wrist. We found again that a particular judged heaviness corresponded to judged throw-ability. However, rotational inertia was found to have no effect on either judgment, suggesting that rotational inertia does not determine perceived heaviness of spherical objects held in the hand, as it did for the weighted-rod-type objects used by Amazeen and Turvey.

Asunto(s)