Aviat Space Envir Md
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Aviat Space Envir Md · May 2007
Alcohol violations and aviation accidents: findings from the U.S. mandatory alcohol testing program.
Mandatory alcohol testing has been implemented in the U.S. aviation industry since 1995. This study documents the prevalence of alcohol violations and the association between alcohol violations and aviation accidents among aviation employees with safety-sensitive functions. ⋯ Alcohol violations among U.S. major airline employees with safety-sensitive functions are rare and play a negligible role in aviation accidents.
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Aviat Space Envir Md · May 2007
Implications for studying team cognition and team performance in network-centric warfare paradigms.
Network-centric warfare's (NCW) information-rich systems involving sophisticated sensors, tracking systems, smart weapons, and enhanced digital communications threaten to overload combatants with voluminous amounts of data. It is unclear whether warfighters will perceive such extensive data as actionable information to which they will respond accurately in a timely enough manner. Members of small teams in command and control centers, operating in crew-served vehicles, or simply "grunting it out" as ground-pounding infantrymen, may be disparately separated by space, but will communicate and be connected by electronic linkages, e.g., radio, text messages, situation displays, or global positioning data. ⋯ Such exceptional capabilities are required more now than ever before; such capabilities today are far from assured. After two workshops to establish performance metrics for assessing cognitive performance of military personnel in NCW, this preface introduces five manuscripts addressing team cognition and team performance from both a theoretical and a practical perspective. The authors of this preface question if NCW, and perhaps the politico-social ramifications of modern warfare, have already outstripped behavioral scientists' approach to researching team cognition and team performance-expertise that is so crucially needed for combatants on the rapidly changing 21st-century battlegrounds.
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Aviat Space Envir Md · May 2007
ReviewMarkers for enhancing team cognition in complex environments: the power of team performance diagnosis.
Team cognition has been identified as a key component to achieve mission goals in dynamic, team-based, stressful, distributed and multicultural operations. Effective team performance in complex environments requires that team members hold a shared understanding of the task, their equipment, and their teammates. ⋯ Therefore, the purpose of this article is fourfold: I) to present a brief account of team cognition; 2) to develop the concept of performance diagnosis and present SBT as an approach to the performance diagnosis of team cognition; 3) to present a set of illustrative behavioral markers of team cognition; and 4) to explicate how these elements (performance diagnosis, team cognition, and SBT) can be leveraged to increase training effectiveness through the development of performance profiles--a rich, detailed, and informative set of metrics--and cognitive and behavioral indicators or illustrative markers of team cognition. Research needs are discussed in terms of realizing the potential of this approach in operational and embedded training contexts.
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Aviat Space Envir Md · May 2007
Linguistic correlates of team performance: toward a tool for monitoring team functioning during space missions.
Approaches to mitigating the likelihood of psychosocial problems during space missions emphasize preflight measures such as team training and team composition. Additionally, it may be necessary to monitor team interactions during missions for signs of interpersonal stress. The present research was conducted to identify features in team members' communications indicative of team functioning. ⋯ Analyses isolated certain task-related and social features of team communication related to team functioning. Team success was associated with the extent to which team members shared task-critical information, equally participated and built on each other's contributions, showed agreement, and positive affect.
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Aviat Space Envir Md · May 2007
ReviewAugmenting team cognition in human-automation teams performing in complex operational environments.
There is a growing reliance on automation (e.g., intelligent agents, semi-autonomous robotic systems) to effectively execute increasingly cognitively complex tasks. Successful team performance for such tasks has become even more dependent on team cognition, addressing both human-human and human-automation teams. Team cognition can be viewed as the binding mechanism that produces coordinated behavior within experienced teams, emerging from the interplay between each team member's individual cognition and team process behaviors (e.g., coordination, communication). ⋯ Toward this end, we present a preliminary theoretical framework illustrating how the design and implementation of automation technology may influence team cognition and team coordination in complex operational environments. Integrating constructs from organizational and cognitive science, our proposed framework outlines how information exchange and updating between humans and automation technology may affect lower-level (e.g., working memory) and higher-level (e.g., sense making) cognitive processes as well as teams' higher-order "metacognitive" processes (e.g., performance monitoring). Issues surrounding human-automation interaction are discussed and implications are presented within the context of designing automation technology to improve task performance in human-automation teams.