Impact of Individual Game-Based Training on Team Cognitive Readiness

Abstract

Training for enhanced team performance currently offers several challenges in both delivery of training and assessment of outcomes. If a team is performing poorly, is it a problem with teaming skills, with individual task-specific skills, with the cognitive readiness of the individuals on the team, or with the cognitive readiness of the team itself? Individuals that have been trained on basic teaming skills—i.e., how to perform as a team member or leader in a team—may demonstrate very poor performance on team-based tasks when they are not cognitively ready to perform those tasks. Moreover, the team as a whole may demonstrate poor performance even if certain individuals within the team are cognitively ready. We present our efforts to improve the performance of teams solely by enhancing the cognitive readiness of the team members through individual, consistent training. We developed a game-based training system to enhance the cognitive readiness of U.S. Navy recruits on shipboard damage control activities. Performance of individuals acting independently on a real-world transfer task showed a highly significant, broad-based improvement in individual performance as a result of playing the game. Performance of teams on several real-world transfer tasks showed significant improvements on several performance dimensions after playing the game as individuals. The results indicate that individual training on the cognitive readiness skills of situational awareness, communication, and decision-making may have a strong impact on the performance of teams. We discuss our results and the challenges in assessing team performance in a dynamic, noisy team environment. We present our recommendations for further studies in training and assessing team cognitive readiness.