Dynamic Resource Allocation and Adaptability in Teamwork

: Prior research in this program established that team performance is a consequence of how individuals allocate resources to accomplish multiple goals. This project extended that work around two primary research foci. The first focus built on our prior research on feedback as a means to influence dynamic resource allocation and adaptation. Resource allocation is a promising mechanism to explain performance adaptation to unexpected environmental perturbations. In general, the findings indicate that priming resource allocation and providing more rapid feedback updating on goal-performance discrepancies enhanced situation assessment, strategy selection, and performance adaptation. Both interventions have implications for training design and embedded decision aids. The second focus unpacked the resource allocation process by examining the dynamic interplay among the core elements of goals, effort, and performance over time. Although our prior research demonstrated that these elements were responsible for individual and team performance, the dynamic interplay was not addressed. Modeling these dynamics over time yielded important insights that will enable improved human performance in complex task domains. In particular, this extension of our research paradigm enables more precise modeling of the limits and wide variance of human performance for dynamic resource allocation. This serves as a basis for more accurate evaluation of experimental interventions designed to improve multiple goal regulation and performance adaptation, and to develop formal models of that process.