Analysis of Communication, Team Situational Awareness, and Feedback in a Three-Person Intelligent Team Tutoring System.

This research assessed how the performance and team skills of three-person teams working with an Intelligent Team Tutoring System (ITTS) on a virtual military surveillance task were affected by feedback privacy, participant role, task experience, prior team experience, and teammate familiarity. Previous work in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) has focused on outcomes for task skill training for individual learners. As research extends into intelligent tutoring for teams, both task skills and team skills are necessary for good team performance. This work includes a brief review of previous research on ITTSs, feedback, teams, and teamwork, including the recounting of two categories of a framework of teamwork performance, Communication and Cognition, which are relevant to the present study. This research examines the effects of an intelligent agent, as well as features of the team, its members, and the task being undertaken, on team communication (measured by relevant key-presses) and team situation awareness (as measured by scores on a quiz). Thirty-seven teams of three participants, each at their own computer running a multiplayer surveillance simulation, were given just-in-time private (individually delivered) or public (team-delivered) performance feedback during four 5-min trials. In the fourth trial, two of the three participants switched roles. Feedback type, teamwork experience, and teammate familiarity had no statistically significant effect on communication or team situation awareness. However, higher levels of role experience and task experience showed significant and medium-sized effects on communication performance. Results, based on performance data and structured interview responses, also revealed areas of improvement in future feedback design and a potential benchmark for feedback frequency in an action-oriented serious game-based ITTS. Among the conclusions are six design objectives for future ITTSs, establishing a foundation for future research on designing effective ITTSs that train interpersonal skills to nascent teams.

Teleporting through virtual environments: Effects of path scale and environment scale on spatial updating.

Virtual reality systems typically allow users to physically walk and turn, but virtual environments (VEs) often exceed the available walking space. Teleporting has become a common user interface, whereby the user aims a laser pointer to indicate the desired location, and sometimes orientation, in the VE before being transported without self-motion cues. This study evaluated the influence of rotational self-motion cues on spatial updating performance when teleporting, and whether the importance of rotational cues varies across movement scale and environment scale. Participants performed a triangle completion task by teleporting along two outbound path legs before pointing to the unmarked path origin. Rotational self-motion reduced overall errors across all levels of movement scale and environment scale, though it also introduced a slight bias toward under-rotation. The importance of rotational self-motion was exaggerated when navigating large triangles and when the surrounding environment was large. Navigating a large triangle within a small VE brought participants closer to surrounding landmarks and boundaries, which led to greater reliance on piloting (landmark-based navigation) and therefore reduced-but did not eliminate-the impact of rotational self-motion cues. These results indicate that rotational self-motion cues are important when teleporting, and that navigation can be improved by enabling piloting.

Spatial cognitive implications of teleporting through virtual environments.

Teleporting is a popular interface to allow virtual reality users to explore environments that are larger than the available walking space. When teleporting, the user positions a marker in the virtual environment and is instantly transported without any self-motion cues. Five experiments were designed to evaluate the spatial cognitive consequences of teleporting and to identify environmental cues that could mitigate those costs. Participants performed a triangle completion task by traversing 2 outbound path legs before pointing to the unmarked path origin. Locomotion was accomplished via walking or 2 common implementations of the teleporting interface distinguished by the concordance between movement of the body and movement through the virtual environment. In the partially concordant teleporting interface, participants teleported to translate (change position) but turned the body to rotate. In the discordant teleporting interface, participants teleported to translate and rotate. Across all 5 experiments, discordant teleporting produced larger errors than partially concordant teleporting which produced larger errors than walking, reflecting the importance of translational and rotational self-motion cues. Furthermore, geometric boundaries (room walls or a fence) were necessary to mitigate the spatial cognitive costs associated with teleporting, and landmarks were helpful only in the context of a geometric boundary. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Shoulder Muscular Fatigue From Static Posture Concurrently Reduces Cognitive Attentional Resources.

OBJECTIVE: The goal of this work is to determine whether muscular fatigue concurrently reduces cognitive attentional resources in technical tasks for healthy adults. BACKGROUND: Muscular fatigue is common in the workplace but often dissociated with cognitive performance. A corpus of literature demonstrates a link between muscular fatigue and cognitive function, but few investigations demonstrate that the instigation of the former degrades the latter in a way that may affect technical task completion. For example, laparoscopic surgery increases muscular fatigue, which may risk attentional capacity reduction and undermine surgical outcomes. METHOD: A total of 26 healthy participants completed a dual-task cognitive assessment of attentional resources while concurrently statically fatiguing their shoulder musculature until volitional failure, in a similar loading pattern observed in laparoscopic procedures. Continuous and discrete monitoring task performance was recorded to reflect attentional resources. RESULTS: Electromyography of the anterior deltoid and descending trapezius, as well as self-assessment surveys indicated fatigue occurrence; continuous tracking error, tracking velocity, and response time significantly increased with muscular fatigue. CONCLUSION: Muscular fatigue concurrently degrades cognitive attentional resources. APPLICATION: Complex tasks that rely on muscular and cognitive performance should consider interventions to reduce muscular fatigue to also preserve cognitive performance.