Modeling and simulation of three-person team cooperation considering mutual beliefs

Research on team has been conducted for many years because a team is a basic functional unit in sociotechnical systems. A major approach used in team research is an empirical approach, such as analysis of verbal and behavioral data obtained by field observations or laboratory experiments. This has advanced understanding of various factors that contribute to team performance. A cognitive process behind team interaction is one of the key factors, and its understanding has also progressed based mainly on empirical approaches; however, this approach requires a lot of effort and is limited in terms of the number of samples of experimental data and team contexts, so it is impossible to avoid certain limitations in terms of the research efficiency and the reliability and generality of the findings. In contrast, agent-based simulation can be repeatedly executed under various conditions with minimal effort, and is therefore a useful as an effective complementary approach to the empirical approach. However, existing agent-based simulations only partially or simplistically describe the cognitive processes and are therefore still insufficient to promote its research. The present study developed a simulation model of the cognitive processes that endogenously generate interactions with other agents and the environment to achieve a common goal. This model is structured based on a theoretical model of team cognition and simulates the cognitive process of how agents generate interactions. The present study applied the developed model to a cooperative diagnosis task of car malfunctions and conducted simulations to observe how the cognitive processes behind team interactions affect the information acquisition and sharing processes for building team situation awareness. The simulation results showed that mutual beliefs, main components of the model of team cognition driving the cognitive processes behind team interactions, could generally improve the efficiency and stability for building team situation awareness in the tested scenarios but could sometimes have a negative effect. We believe that this study provides a foundation for simulation studies on cognitive processes behind team interactions and can contribute to the advancement of human factor studies on team cooperation.