Intelligent group interfaces: Envisioned designs for exploring team cognition in emergency crisis management

This dissertation advances the intelligent group interface (IGI) as a cognitive tool to support teams dealing with acute, ill-defined problems like those experienced by emergency crisis management teams. The IGI uses concepts from team cognition and intelligent user interface (IUI) research and integrates them to create a new type of interface designed specifically for these types of teams. Following a cognitive systems engineering approach, this research (1) designed and implemented three candidate IGI designs based on IUI and team cognition principles; (2) guided the development of a synthetic task environment, NeoCITIES, to explore the efficacy of the IGI designs in an empirical setting; and (3) conducted a user-based experiment that tested the candidate designs in an empirical study of team performance and team mental model formation. The study also served as an initial testbed for the NeoCITIES synthetic task environment. The results of this study revealed that team performance is affected by the presence of an adaptation strategy and the number of times a team is exposed to the task environment. The experimental results also showed that team mental model formation, as measured by team member schema similarity, was affected by adaptation strategy, but not by the number of exposures to which a team was subjected.