Information Flow and Development of Coordination in Distributed Supervisory Control Teams

This article presents results of a study to examine the flow of information between members of a new task team conducting a distributed supervisory control task. The emphasis of this project was on the effects of information presentation and message transmission delays on the development of effective information flow among human operators. The project focused on the earliest stages of team performance to explore how teams begin to refine distributed task coordination. The task simulation used in this project was a distributed navigation task based on a commercially available computer game (Spectre VRTM). Teams of three ("out the window" [OTW] observer, "long-range radar" observer, and a driver without direct visual information) were required to navigate a vehicle in a dynamic and potentially hostile environment containing obstacles and moving hazards. The goal of the task was to accumulate points through capturing flags. Information presentation was manipulated through standard game selections of wirefram...