A Multiplayer Team Performance Task: Design and Evaluation

Abstract

This chapter describes a Team Performance Task (TPT) that has been designed to assess the status of a three-person team operating a game-like multiplayer task requiring inter-player cooperation to achieve optimal performance effectiveness. The objective of the TPT is to extract features of an operational setting that may be integrated into a task scenario that will yield multi-dimensional indices of both individual and team performances that are sensitive to alterations in the workload parameters and to the skill level and cohesion of the players. The design of a prototype task is described in detail, and evaluative results based on observations of five groups of three players are presented to show the individual and team metrics of performance effectiveness that are made available with this task. Future applications of the TPT are suggested, to include its potential to diagnose and support the cohesiveness and operational readiness of teams operating within space-based and other challenging environments.