Team Performance in a Simulated Maritime Control Room: The Effect of Information Integration and Operator Configuration

How team cognition is conceptualized has evolved rapidly in the last decade with the emerging use of a systems approach, moving the focus from the cognition residing in the heads of individuals, to that distributed across the team. This is referred to as ‘distributed cognition’. Increasingly, network approaches are being explored in attempts to model team distributed cognition. The specific domain of interest in the present study is the sociotechnical system within a maritime control room. This comprises human, machine and software agents interacting to interpret sensor data in order to develop a timely and accurate picture of surrounding contacts at sea. To achieve the goal, information is shared or integrated across the maritime control room consoles. The aim of this study was to develop and apply a suite of workload, situation awareness and team performance measures, including network analysis techniques, to examine how the distributed cognition of a team might change as a function of console configuration and information integration within a control room, and how these changes, if any, impact overall team performance. Sixteen teams of six novices conducted two one-hour scenarios operating generic maritime control room positions. Each team completed a one-hour simulation in each of two console configuration layouts with the order counter-balanced (within-subject design). Half the teams conducted the two scenarios in a high integration condition, and half in a low integration condition (between-subjects). The human machine interface (HMI) designs for the high integration condition emerged from a series of task analyses and user-centered design workshops. The emergent cognitively –oriented HMI designs are based on the assumption that each console can freely share information with other consoles. To create an analogue of current, less-integrated, and more stove-piped systems, a low integration condition was created where not all information was shared across consoles, but instead was shared verbally by console operators. Contacts detected at sea were introduced into the simulation and the team’s task was to assess, report and derive a solution (location, course, and speed) for each detected contact. Individual situation awareness was measured through the Situation Present Assessment Method (SPAM) and individual workload through the Air Traffic Workload Indicator Task (ATWIT). Team interaction from the scenarios were video recorded and we applied the Event