Evaluating teamwork development in combat training settings: An exploratory case study utilising the Junior Leaders' Field Gun competition.

A behaviourally-anchored observational rating scale (BAORS) of teamwork based upon the 'Big Five' teamwork model (Salas et al., 2005) was selected and adapted for use in a combat training setting - a UK military field gun competition. The teamwork development of 16 newly-formed teams training to master a historic tactical drill was evaluated over the course of a week-long residential programme. Training culminated in a timed field gun competition. Teams were trained and mentored in respects to teamwork and taskwork by experienced military instructors. Teamwork was assessed at the outset and end of training. Significant improvements were evident on all teamwork process dimensions, with the greatest improvement seen in teams' shared understanding of teamwork roles and strategies (shared mental models). The lack of an association between teamwork development and final drill performance is explored, as is the utility of the measurement protocol developed for teamwork assessment in other settings.

Experimental and computation assessment of thermomechanical effects during auxetic foam fabrication.

Auxetic foams continue to interest researchers owing to their unique and enhanced properties. Existing studies attest to the importance of fabrication mechanisms and parameters. However, disparity in thermo-mechanical parameters has left much debate as to which factors dominate fabrication output quality. This paper provides experimental, computational, and statistical insights into the mechanisms that enable auxetic foams to be produced, using key parameters reported within the literature: porosity; heating time; and volumetric compression ratio. To advance the considerations on manufacturing parameter dominance, both study design and scale have been optimised to enable statistical inferences to be drawn. Whilst being unusual for a manufacturing domain, such additional analysis provides more conclusive evidence of auxetic properties and highlights the supremacy of volumetric compression ratio in predicting Poisson's ratio outcomes in the manufacture process. Furthermore statistical results are exploited to formulate key recommendations for those wishing to maximise/optimise auxetic foam production.

The influence of training and experience on memory strategy.

This paper investigates whether, and if so how much, prior training and experience overwrite the influence of the constraints of the task environment on strategy deployment. This evidence is relevant to the theory of soft constraints that focuses on the role of constraints in the task environment (Gray, Simms, Fu, & Schoelles, Psychological Review, 113: 461-482, 2006). The theory explains how an increase in the cost of accessing information induces a more memory-based strategy involving more encoding and planning. Experiments 1 and 3 adopt a traditional training and transfer design using the Blocks World Task in which participants were exposed to training trials involving a 2.5-s delay in accessing goal-state information before encountering transfer trials in which there was no access delay. The effect of prior training was assessed by the degree of memory-based strategy adopted in the transfer trials. Training with an access delay had a substantial carry-over effect and increased the subsequent degree of memory-based strategy adopted in the transfer environment. However, such effects do not necessarily occur if goal-state access cost in training is less costly than in transfer trials (Experiment 2). Experiment 4 used a fine-grained intra-trial design to examine the effect of experiencing access cost on one, two, or three occasions within the same trial and found that such experience on two consecutive occasions was sufficient to induce a more memory-based strategy. This paper establishes some effects of training that are relevant to the soft constraints theory and also discusses practical implications.

The nature of complexity facing novice designers in a constraint satisfaction task.

This paper examines the effects of different types of complexity facing novice designers in constraint satisfaction tasks. The nature of the complexity in a design task was varied by manipulating different aspects of the extrinsic constraints, which refer to restrictions concerning how design components can be assembled. We investigated the effect of the number of constraints (Study 1) and the number of different types of constraint (Study 2) in a simulated office design task. Results indicated that tackling a design task with a greater number of constraints, or more types of constraint, resulted in decrements in performance. Study 3 examined the effect of reasoning about constraints that involved a fixed location in the office layout and those that did not. It was found that having a higher proportion of constraints that referenced a fixed location led to better design performance. The theoretical and practical aspects of these results are discussed. Practitioner summary: This paper identifies sources of constraint complexity facing the novice designer in an office design task. Three features of constraints proved problematic: the number of constraints, the number of types of constraint and whether the constraint involved a specific location. Training and decision support solutions are discussed.

A cognitive procedure for representation change in verbal insight problems.

The aim of this study was to develop a novel cognitive procedure for operationalizing how the re-encoding and constraint relaxation, suggested by representational change theory (RCT) (Ohlsson, 1992, 2011), can effect representational change in verbal insight problem solving, thus circumventing the constraints imposed by past experience. Some participants were trained in using an evaluative cognitive procedure that aimed to facilitate the identification of any inconsistency between the participant's interpretation of the problem and the problem statement, and thus cue the re-encoding proposed by RCT. In Experiment 1, participants were randomly allocated to training, practice, or a no-training control condition, and were subsequently tested on 7 verbal insight problems. Concurrent verbal protocols were collected and analyzed to identify problem solvers' proposed hypotheses and also to assess whether problem solving behavior changed in line with the training. Inconsistency identification training, rather than practice or no training, improved solution rate across novel problems and resulted in more paraphrasing and questioning of the problem statement, and a modest increase in participants' reflection on their problem solving. Results from Experiment 2 indicated that this improvement in representation change through training was not due to increased awareness of the nature of verbal insight problems but rather training in identifying inconsistencies between the problem statement and a person's interpretation of it. Experiment 3 revealed that the performance improvement with training was sustained after a delay of 48 hr. Theoretical and methodological issues are discussed.