Nancy J Cooke

Arizona State University | ASU · Human Systems Engineering, The Polytechnic School, Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering

Team communication contents provide insights into teammates' coordination processes and perceptions of each other. We investigated how personifying and objectifying contents in human-machine team communication relate to trust, anthropomorphism, and team performance in a simulated remotely piloted aircraft reconnaissance task. A total of 46 particip...

Teams are essential for most modern work. But who or what is a team? With today’s rapidly diverse team contexts and the diversity of research frameworks for studying them, there is no longer a definitive answer to this question. Thus, Cooke et al. introduced “teamness,” a construct through which future research can describe teamwork as a function o...

Human Autonomy Teams (HATs) have been studied and many factors can influence HAT performance. However, how HATs manage team errors has yet to be understood. This paper explores how HATs manage team errors, specifically after automation errors and after receiving different forms of team training, using previously collected data. Three-member teams o...

This study focuses on detecting unique and complex challenges of Human-Machine Teaming (HMT) in space missions, where coordination among humans, robots, and AI agents is critical. Such missions are beset by “perturbations”—unexpected challenges involving communication delays due to the vast distances separating team elements. These issues must be o...

Teams are a fundamental aspect of life—from sports to business, to defense, to science, to education. While the cognitive sciences tend to focus on information processing within individuals, others have argued that teams are also capable of demonstrating cognitive capacities similar to humans, such as skill acquisition and forgetting (cf., Cooke, G...

Skraaning and Jamieson raise some interesting issues related to the response of humans to automation failures and offer a taxonomy of failure types that broadens its definition. In this commentary a further attempt to broaden the scope of automation failures is made that places failures within a sociotechnical system of multiple humans and multiple...

Objective This study examines low-, medium-, and high-performing Human-Autonomy Teams’ (HATs’) communication strategies during various technological failures that impact routine communication strategies to adapt to the task environment. Background Teams must adapt their communication strategies during dynamic tasks, where more successful teams mak...

This work examines two human–autonomy team (HAT) training approaches that target communication and trust calibration to improve team effectiveness under degraded conditions. Human–autonomy teaming presents challenges to teamwork, some of which may be addressed through training. Factors vital to HAT performance include communication and calibrated...

This expert panel is the first of a two-panel series marking the 40 th anniversary of “Cognitive Systems Engineering: New Wine in New Bottles” by Hollnagel and Woods (1983) and, arguably, the beginning of Cognitive Systems Engineering (CSE). These experts were there at (or near) the beginning, devising new methods, expanding and creating new theori...

Team workload is a team-level construct considered similar to, but not reducible to, individual workload and mediated by team coordination. Despite this, the conceptualization and measurement of team workload in action teams lags behind that of individual workload. In most empirical studies, team workload is often simply considered as the sum or av...

Trust plays a critical role in the success of human-robot teams (HRTs). While typically studied as a perceptual attitude, trust also encompasses individual dispositions and interactive behaviors like compliance. Anthropomorphism, the attribution of human-like qualities to robots, is a related phenomenon that designers often leverage to positively i...

Resilient teams overcome sudden, dynamic changes by enacting rapid, adaptive responses that maintain system effectiveness. We analyzed two experiments on human-autonomy teams (HATs) operating a simulated remotely piloted aircraft system (RPAS) and correlated dynamical measures of resilience with measures of team performance. Across both experiments...

Air traffic control (ATC) is a safety-critical service system that demands constant attention from ground air traffic controllers (ATCos) to maintain daily aviation operations. The workload of the ATCos can have negative effects on operational safety and airspace usage. To avoid overloading and ensure an acceptable workload level for the ATCos, it...

Air traffic control (ATC) is a safety-critical service system that demands constant attention from ground air traffic controllers (ATCos) to maintain daily aviation operations. The workload of the ATCos can have negative effects on operational safety and airspace usage. To avoid overloading and ensure an acceptable workload level for the ATCos, it...

Artificial intelligence-enabled decision support systems (AI-DSSs) can process highly complex information to recommend or execute decisions autonomously, but often at the cost of lacking transparency and explainability. The existence of inherent human limitations in understanding increasingly inexplicable AI-DSSs, however, raise the question of peo...

Understanding how people trust autonomous systems is crucial to achieving better performance and safety in human-autonomy teaming. Trust in automation is a rich and complex process that has given rise to numerous measures and approaches aimed at comprehending and examining it. Although researchers have been developing models for understanding the d...

Artificial social intelligence (ASI) agents have great potential to aid the success of individuals, human-human teams, and human-artificial intelligence teams. To develop helpful ASI agents, we created an urban search and rescue task environment in Minecraft to evaluate ASI agents' ability to infer participants' knowledge training conditions and pr...

Objective: We review the current state-of-the-art in team cognition research, but more importantly describe the limitations of existing theories, laboratory paradigms, and measures considering the increasing complexities of modern teams and the study of team cognition. Background: Research on, and applications of, team cognition has led to theor...

Predicting separation errors in the daily tasks of air traffic controllers (ATCOs) is essential for the timely implementation of mitigation strategies before performance declines and the prevention of loss of separation and aircraft collisions. However, three challenges impede accurate separation errors forecasting: 1) compounding relationships bet...

Driver-environment-automation systems exhibit a wide range of distinctive behavioral patterns that emerge without centralized instructions. To understand and quantify their emergence, we examined the nested processes that contribute to behavior at the measured scale using three dynamical systems analyses: multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis...

Teams composed of human and machine members operating in complex task environments must effectively interact in response to information flow while adapting to environmental changes. This study investigates how interpersonal coordination dynamics between team members are associated with team performance and shared situation awareness in a simulated...

Cyber attackers commonly operate in teams, which may process information collectively and thus, may be best understood when the team is treated as the unit of analysis. Future research in Oppositional Human Factors (OHF) should consider the impact of team-influencing and team-level biases and the impact that defensive interventions have on team cog...

The goal of the Space Challenge project is to identify the challenges faced by teams in space operations and then represent those challenges in a distributed human-machine teaming scenario that resembles typical space operations and to measure the coordination dynamics across the entire system. Currently, several challenges have been identified thr...

The decision process of engaging or disengaging automation has been termed reliance on automation, and it has been widely analyzed as a summary measure of automation usage rather than a dynamic measure. We provide a framework for defining temporal reliance dynamics and apply it to a data-set from a previous study. Our findings show that (1) the hig...

Risk has been a key factor influencing trust in Human-Automation interactions, though there is no unified tool to study its dynamics. We provide a framework for defining and assessing relative risk of automation usage through performance dynamics and apply this framework to a dataset from a previous study. Our approach allows us to explore how oper...

Virtual testbeds are fundamental to the success of research on cognitive work in safety-critical domains. A testbed that can meet researchers' objectives and create a sense of reality for participants positively impacts the research process; they have the potential to allow researchers to address questions not achievable in physical environments. T...

Workplace research suggests that roughly equal communication between teammates is positively associated with team effectiveness. A distinction between teams in these studies and distributed action teams is the degree of role specialization and context-driven communication which may entail unequal degrees of communication. Yet, distributed action te...

Air Traffic Controllers (ATCs) communicate with pilots through radio communication. Speech intelligibility is vital in ensuring that the message is conveyed accurately. Factors such as speech rate affect this. Additionally, workload and stress have been shown to affect how people communicate significantly. In this paper, we attempt to analyze the v...

This study investigated in 22 teams, individual and team trust measures reported by two human participants, recruited from a university populace, as they interacted with each other, robotic combat vehicles (RCVs), a human superior, and their team during a simulated Next Generation Combat Vehicle (NGCV) mission conducted within Minecraft. Trust was...

The present research examines a pattern-based measure of communications based on Closed Loop Communications (CLC) and non-content verbal metrics to predict Loss of Separation (LOS) in the National Airspace System (NAS). This study analyzes the transcripts from six retired Air Traffic Controllers (ATC) who participated in three simulated trials of v...

Navigation is critical for everyday tasks but is especially important for urban search and rescue (USAR) contexts. Aside from successful navigation, individuals must also be able to effectively communicate spatial information. This study investigates how differences in spatial ability affected overall performance in a USAR task in a simulated Minec...

This study examined dyadic team coordination dynamics to understand teammate influence when humans team with an intelligent machine. In a synthetic remotely piloted aircraft system environment, heterogeneous teams of three members were required to take good photos of critical target waypoints during simulated missions by interacting with each other...

Teams are complex systems with many different layers that interact with one another to accomplish a common goal or task. The physiological layer is just one of them. In this study, first, we examined how the Holder exponent, which was extracted from heart rate variability, changed across the missions and roles, and then how the holder exponent is r...

Navigation is critical for everyday tasks but is especially important for urban search and rescue (USAR) contexts. Aside from successful navigation, individuals must also be able to effectively communicate spatial information. This study investigates how differences in spatial ability affected overall performance in a USAR task in a simulated Minec...

This study investigated in 22 teams, individual and team trust measures reported by two human participants, recruited from a university populace, as they interacted with each other, robotic combat vehicles (RCVs), a human superior, and their team during a simulated Next Generation Combat Vehicle (NGCV) mission conducted within Minecraft. Trust was...

Ubụrụ is an executive function computerized rehabilitation application specifically designed for mild Traumatic Brain Injury (mTBI) individuals. Ụbụrụ utilizes serious games to train cognitive flexibility, planning, and organization. This paper explores the rationale and components behind the alpha stage of the application's development, and its fi...

This research examines the relationship between anticipatory pushing of information and trust in human-machine teaming in a synthetic task environment for remotely piloted aircraft systems. Two human participants and one Artificial Intelligent based agent, emulated by a confederate experimenter, executed a series of missions as a team of three, und...

Workplace research suggests that roughly equal communication between teammates may predict team effectiveness. A distinction between teams in these studies and distributed action teams is the degree of role specialization and context-driven communication which may entail unequal degrees of communication. Yet, distributed action teams may have more...

The current study considers Human-Autonomy teams (HATs) in which two human team members interact and collaborate with an autonomous teammate to achieve a common task while dealing with unexpected technological failures that were imposed either in automation or autonomy. A Wizard of Oz (WoZ) methodology was used to simulate the autonomous teammate....

Autonomous robots have the potential to play a critical role in urban search and rescue (USAR) by allowing human counterparts of a response team to remain in remote, stable locations while the robots execute more dangerous work in the field. However, challenges remain in developing robot capabilities suitable for teaming with humans. Communicating...

Project overview. As Human–AI–Robot Teams (HARTs) become prevalent in safety-critical domains, team resilience becomes increasingly relevant for assessing their effectiveness. This study explores a dynamical systems approach to connect interaction-based measures of nominal teamwork with processes and outcomes related to positive adaptation in pertu...

Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) missions often involve a need to complete tasks in hazardous environments. In such situations, human-robot teams (HRT) may be essential tools for future USAR missions. Transparency and explanation are two information exchange processes where transparency is real-time information exchange and explanation is not. For ef...

Project Overview. Communication is a key ingredient of team cognition (Cooke, Gorman, Myers, & Duran, 2013), and is both a factor and a manifestation of trust in human-autonomy teams (HATs; Hou, Ho, & Dunwoody, 2021). Anthropomorphism, or the attribution of humanlike qualities to inanimate objects, is a distinct factor in human trust in automation...

Trust in autonomous teammates has been shown to be a key factor in human-autonomy team (HAT) performance, and anthropomorphism is a closely related construct that is underexplored in HAT literature. This study investigates whether perceived anthropomorphism can be measured from team communication behaviors in a simulated remotely piloted aircraft s...

This research examines the relationship between anticipatory pushing of information and trust in human–autonomy teaming in a remotely piloted aircraft system - synthetic task environment. Two participants and one AI teammate emulated by a confederate executed a series of missions under routine and degraded conditions. We addressed the following que...

The implementation of electronic team training, e-team training, has been used to teach teamwork skills in a wide array of industries. By using e-team training, organizations have seen the observable benefits of improved team effectiveness, faster response times, and reduction in training costs. Those learning from e-team training have reported add...

To support research on artificial social intelligence for successful teams (ASIST), an urban search and rescue task (USAR) was simulated within Minecraft to serve as a Synthetic Task Environment (STE). The goal for the development of the present STE was to create an environment that provides ample opportunities to allow ASI agents to demonstrate th...

Exploration and exploitation are commonly cited in search and rescue scenarios to explain the process by which individuals work in a team and gather information about their environment (exploration) and identify potential solutions and adaptations (exploitation) to pursue successful outcomes. In this paper, we discuss exploration and exploitation a...

This panel will discuss issues related to Manned-Unmanned Teaming (MUMT) technologies. Panelists were selected to represent diverse topics and each will provide a unique perspective on the MUMT challenge space. Joseph Lyons will frame the discussion and introduce the panelists. Each panelist will provide an overview of the MUMT research/application...

Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) missions often involve a need to complete tasks in hazardous environments. In such situations, human-robot teams (HRT) may be essential tools for future USAR missions. Transparency and explanation are two information exchange processes where transparency is real-time information exchange and explanation is not. For ef...

The present research defines a pattern-based measure for deviations from Closed LoopCommunication Deviations (CLCD) that can be used to predict Loss of Separation (LOS).Six retired Air Traffic Controllers were recruited and tested in three conditions of varyingworkload in a TRACON arrival radar simulation. Communication transcripts fromsimulated tr...

This study focuses on methodological adaptations and considerations for remote research on Human–AI–Robot Teaming (HART) amidst the COVID‐19 pandemic. Themes and effective remote research methods were explored. Central issues in remote research were identified, such as challenges in attending to participants' experiences, coordinating experimenter...

This article focuses on two fundamental human-human teamwork processes and seeks to understand them better in human-machine teams. Specifically, team situation awareness (TSA) and team conflict are examined in human-machine teams. There is a significant need to identify how TSA and team conflict occur during human-machine teaming, in addition to ho...

Evaluation of team communication can provide critical insights into team dynamics, cohesion, trust, and performance on joint tasks. Although many communication-based measures have been tested and validated for human teams, this review article extends this research by identifying key approaches specific to human-autonomy teams. It is not possible to...

This study aims to better understand trust in human-autonomy teams, finding that trust is important to team performance. A wizard of oz methodology was used in an experiment to simulate an autonomous agent as a team member in a remotely piloted aircraft system environment. Specific focuses of the study were team performance and team social behavior...

Project Overview. Human-autonomy teaming is a paradigm in which humans and artificially intelligent agents work together as teammates. Effective team coordination includes anticipating the information needs of teammates, pushing the right information to the right place, at the right time, and maintaining flexible coordination to adapt to changing c...

Security analysts regularly correlate disparate incidents to detect cyber-attacks. However, past research shows that team-based incident correlation analysis may be affected by information pooling bias. This article presents findings from an agent-based model used to explore the cognitive processes hypothesized to be causing this bias during inform...

The current study focuses on improving team effectiveness in Next Generation Combat Vehicles (NGCVs) that combine humans, intelligent agents, and unmanned assets working together toward common goals, “teaming”, through the development of interaction strategies for this future contextual domain. Twenty interaction strategies were derived from three...

Any functional human-AI-robot team consists of multiple stakeholders, as well as one or more artificial agents (e.g., AI agents and embodied robotic agents). Each stakeholder's trust in the artificial agent matters because it not only impacts their performance on tasks with human teammates and artificial agents but also influences their trust in ot...

This research leverages the recent success of AFRL's Synthetic Air Vehicle Operator's interactions with Cooke's CERTT Lab on teams. Furthering the effort of better understanding human-autonomy teaming (HAT), we (Cognitive Engineering Research Institute – CERI) conducted a series of experiments to assess the quality of HAT in the face of degraded co...

Verbal communication is important for coordination and performance in many team settings. However, the inclusion of autonomous artificial agents presents challenges to teamwork. This study sought to examine the effects of three different training approaches on team communication behaviors in human-autonomy teams (HATs) under normal and degraded con...

As robots become more autonomous, their roles shift from being operated and controlled by humans to interactively teaming with humans. The current research focuses on how human operators can effectively team with autonomous urban search and rescue agents in a dynamic and complex task environment. To do so, we empirically examined how shared cogniti...

Civil infrastructure systems (CIS) require effective systems-level operation and maintenance (O&M) processes to ensure safety and efficiency. Such processes demand significant human efforts in human/team cognition, decision-making, and execution of activities. Poor human behaviors could affect CIS O&M safety and efficiency. This review synthesized...

On a team, autonomy must be able to work alongside human counterparts and carry out the fundamentals of teamwork and taskwork. In this paper we refer to these ma-chine teammates as autonomy. These Human-Autonomy Teams (HATs) need to be assembled to have the appropriate roles and responsibilities and to interact in an in-terdependent manner. One cha...

Next Generation Combat Vehicles (NGCVs) are incorporating more advanced technology which will enable humans and intelligent artificial agents to team up on the battlefield. Effective system design and evaluation for these human–agent teams require an understanding of individual and team tasks in the context of larger-scale operations. Previous taxo...

The current study focuses on improving team effectiveness in Next Generation Combat Vehicles (NGCVs) that combine humans, intelligent agents, and unmanned assets working together toward common goals, "teaming", through the development of interaction strategies for this future contextual domain. Twenty interaction strategies were derived from three...

SoLaR-SoAR consists of a review of the current state of the art for distributed learning environments. The report is structured for use by multiple types of end users. The main report provides a 22-page, high-level overview of findings of the current state of the art. This section can serve as a quick reference. The report’s Appendixes provide a de...

The primary goal of this experiment is to examine and build dynamical systems models which specify the optimum coordination area that enables teams to perform better when they collaborate with an autonomous agent in the context of explicable behavior. In this preliminary study, we examine team coordination dynamics and explicable behavior by using...

Project overview Teamwork can be defined as dynamic team interaction between two or more interdependent members to achieve a shared goal. Many studies have examined how coordination dynamics are associated with team effectiveness in the context of all-human teams (Gorman, Amazeen, & Cooke, 2010), and later, in human-autonomy teams (HAT)s (Demir, Li...

Project Overview Team Situation Awareness (TSA), which is a part of team cognition, is a critical factor that influences team effectiveness. It can be defined as getting the right information from the right person within the right amount of time, in order to overcome an unexpected event (Gorman, Cooke, Pederson, Connor, & DeJoode, 2005). TSA is dev...

In future urban search and rescue teams, robots may be expected to conduct cognitive tasks. As the capabilities of robots change, so too will their interdependence with human teammates. Human factors and cognitive engineering are well-positioned to guide the design of autonomy for effective teaming. Previous work in the urban search and rescue synt...

Literature New capabilities to modernize the U.S. National Airspace System (NAS) include support of real-time information streams derived from many data sources across the NAS. As an emergent property, safety of the NAS arises from interactions between many elements at different levels, ranging from those attributable to humans, technology, and the...

Project overview Team resilience is an interactive and dynamic process that develops over time while a team maintains performance. This study aims to empirically investigate systems-level resilience in a Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) System simulated task environment by examining team interaction during novel events. The approach used in the curr...

Project overview As a team explores interactions, they may find opportunities to expand and refine teamwork over time. This can have consequences for team effectiveness in normal and unexpected situations (Woods, 2018). Understanding the role of exploratory team interactions may be relevant for human-autonomy team (HAT) resilience in the face of sy...

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (the National Academies) conducted a decadal survey (anticipated report release date is 5 March 2019) to explore and identify promising research opportunities in the social and behavioral sciences (SBS) for applications to national security. The report also provides guidance for the deve...

Project overview. Team resilience is an interactive and dynamic process that develops over time while a team maintains performance. This study aims to empirically investigate systems-level resilience in a Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) System simulated task environment by examining team interaction during novel events. The approach used in the cur...

The focus of this current research is twofold: (1) to understand how team interaction in human-autonomy teams (HAT)s evolve in the Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) task context, and (2) to understand how HATs respond to three types of failures (automation, autonomy, and cyber-attack) over time. We summarize the findings from three of our re...