Improving Team Readiness through the Convergence of Team Mental Models

here is great current interest in improving the contact management of submarines operated in the littorals. Littoral contact management is challenging because the ambiguities inherent in contact localization make accurately reconstructing each contact a hard task. Littoral contact density is high, exacerbating the problem. Knowledge about contacts may become unhelpfully fragmented across the submarine team and there can be critical failures of the team mental model. PSE specializes in scientifically principled user interfaces and tool design for the support of challenging cognitive and collaborative tasks and has extensive recent experience in the submarine domain. In this proposal, PSE proposes to develop a Team Assessment Grid (TAG) to support submarine littoral contact management. The TAG supports the team mental model by making the contact management processes explicit and verifiable. TAG applies scientific concepts from cognitive and collaboration science paired with an on-line computational modeling approach feeding automated aids to team mental model divergence. The TAG will improve the cognitive readiness of contact management teams by improving task performance, shared situation awareness and convergence of the team mental model. The proposal lays out the steps necessary to design, develop a demonstrate a concept demonstration prototype of the TAG system.