Assessing Navigational Teamwork Through the Situational Correctness and Relevance of Communication

Abstract

Investigations of accidents occurring in complex sociotechnical systems have found that communication and coordination among system elements are major contributing factors. The distributed situation awareness of a system is inherently dependent on the level of interaction between system elements. Previous studies have found that the distributed situational relevance of team communication is highly correlated with team performance. This study investigated the impact of the combination of both relevance and situational correctness of communication during simulated high-speed craft navigation. A natural experiment with navigation in the inner Oslo Fjord was performed with a three-person team in a maritime desktop simulator. Participants were required to communicate verbally to ensure safe and efficient navigation. All statements communicated by the participants during the experiment was rated for relevance (relevant/irrelevant) and for situational correctness (correct or incorrect) and these scores was combined to form a Communication score ranging from +1 (good) to -1 (bad). Measures of the relevancy, correctness and the combined communication score were then correlated with the navigational team performance (measured as cross-track error). Findings indicate surprisingly that the relevance of communication (irrespective of its correctness) did not have any relationship to navigational performance (r ≈ 0) while the ratio of wrong communication showed a small to moderate positive correlation (r = .237) to cross-track error. Most interestingly the combined communication score had a moderately large negative correlation with cross-track error (r = -.349) thus indicating that at least for dynamic navigation tasks it is not enough to only look on the relevance of communication – but that also the situational correctness of information must be measured.