As technology improves and increases the likelihood of teams with humans and (semi-)autonomous artificial agents (e.g., virtual or robotic agents), studying potential agent capabilities becomes increasingly meaningful. Studies on organizational science focus on how members of teams communicate effectively. Team members must be able to understand each other’s goals, equipment necessary, and shared information about a given task. Shared mental models (SMMx) have been shown to efficiently expedite this information and allow team members to track each others’ progress.
Matthias Scheutz, Scott DeLoach and Julie A. Adam propose the first formal and computational frameworks for shared organizational mental models for human-robot (H-R) teams by monitoring team members physiological responses. The researchers broke down shared mental models between two key elements; data representations, capturing information and sharing between team members, and computational process, how data representations are shared and maintained. Data representations were broken down into five key component areas; agent capabilities, agent and task states, obligations, activity and equipment types, and functional agent roles. These were all given assigned algorithms to create a formal mathematical model to show how the data representation is maintained. Human Performance Factors (HPF) were also established to potentially provide a means for predicting human behavior and how their performances are affected by various internal, external, organizational and task factors. With the formal framework established, Scheutz, et al. established a computational framework for recording physiological measures to provide what they call “Workload Channel Estimation” that calculates estimates for workloads.
Researchers propose using BIOPAC’s wearable BioHarness monitor that would provide wireless physiological feedback to auditory, tactile, or motor stimuli. These measures would then inform the workload estimation and provide data for the computational framework on how physiological factors maintain the shared mental model. Scheutz, et al’s frameworks can provide new insight into what organizational strategies are most effective in communicating task information and potentially provide a measurement for team members’ most effective workload.
