This article compares the information processing and dynamical systems perspectives on problem solving. Key theoretical constructs of the information-processing perspective include “searching” a “p...

In this study, we explore the future of work by examining differences in productivity when teams are composed of only humans or both humans and machine agents. Our objective was to characterize the similarities and differences between human and human–machine teams as they work to coordinate across their specialized roles. This form of research is increasingly important given that machine agents are becoming commonplace in sociotechnical systems and playing a more active role in collaborative work. One particular class of machine (...) agents, bots, is being introduced to these systems to facilitate both taskwork and teamwork. We investigated the association between bots and productivity outcomes in open source software development through an analysis of hundreds of project teams. The presence of bots in teams was associated with higher levels of productivity and higher work centralization in addition to greater amounts of observed communication. The adoption of bots in software teams may have tradeoffs, in that doing so may increase productivity, but could also increase workload. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings for advancing human–machine teaming research. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 10, October 2022.

The literature on social interactions has shown that participants coordinate not only at the behavioral but also at the physiological and neural levels, and that this coordination gives a temporal structure to the individual and social dynamics. However, it has not been fully explored whether such temporal patterns emerge during interpersonal coordination beyond dyads, whether this phenomenon arises from complex cognitive mechanisms or from relatively simple rules of behavior, or which are the sociocultural processes that underlie this phenomenon. We review (...) the evidence for the existence of group-level rhythmic patterns that result from social interactions and argue that the complexity of group dynamics can lead to temporal regularities that cannot be predicted from the individual periodicities: an emergent collective rhythm. Moreover, we use this interpretation of the literature to discuss how taking into account the sociocultural niche in which individuals develop can help explain the seemingly divergent results that have been reported on the social influences and consequences of interpersonal coordination. We make recommendations on further research to test these arguments and their relationship to the feeling of belonging and assimilation experienced during group dynamics. (shrink)

Cocreating meaning in collaboration is challenging. Success is often determined by people's abilities to coordinate their language to converge upon shared mental representations. Here we explore one set of low‐level linguistic behaviors, linguistic alignment, that both emerges from, and facilitates, outcomes of high‐level convergence. Linguistic alignment captures the ways people reuse, that is, “align to,” the lexical, syntactic, and semantic forms of others' utterances. Our focus is on the temporal change of multi‐level linguistic alignment, as well as how alignment is (...) related to communicative outcomes within a unique collaborative problem‐solving paradigm. The primary task, situated within a virtual educational video game, requires creative thinking between three people where the paths for possible solutions are highly variable. We find that over time interactions are marked by decreasing lexical and syntactic alignment, with a trade‐off of increasing semantic alignment. However, greater semantic alignment does not translate into better team performance. Overall, these findings provide greater clarity on the role of linguistic coordination within complex and dynamic collaborative problem‐solving tasks. (shrink)

Coordinated group behaviour can result in conflict or social cohesion. Thus having a better understanding of coordination in social groups could help us tackle some of our most challenging social problems. Historically, the most common way to study group behaviour is to break it down into sub-processes, such as cognition and emotion, then ideally manipulate them in a social context in order to predict some behaviour such as liking versus distrusting a target person. This approach has gotten us partway to (...) understanding many important collective behaviours, but I argue that making major changes in the world will require a more integrated approach. In this review, I introduce dynamic systems theory, with a focus on interpersonal systems, where all the processes we typically study in individuals, such as cognition and emotion, become intertwined between social partners over time. I focus on the concept of coordination, defined as a temporal correlation between interacting components of a system (or systems) arising due to coupling between them. Finally, I show how this perspective could be used to guide investigations of social problems such as polarisation. (shrink)

We hypothesize that effective collaboration is facilitated when individuals and environmental components form a synergy where they work together and regulate one another to produce stable patterns of behavior, or regularity, as well as adaptively reorganize to form new behaviors, or irregularity. We tested this hypothesis in a study with 32 triads who collaboratively solved a challenging visual computer programming task for 20 min following an introductory warm‐up phase. Multidimensional recurrence quantification analysis was used to examine fine‐grained (i.e., every 10 (...) s) collective patterns of regularity across team members' speech rate, body movement, and team interaction with the shared user interface. We found that teams exhibited significant patterns of regularity as compared to shuffled baselines, but there were no systematic trends in regularity across time. We also found that periods of regularity were associated with a reduction in overall behavior. Notably, the production of irregular behavior predicted expert‐coded metrics of collaborative activity, such as teams' ability to construct shared knowledge and effectively negotiate and coordinate execution of solutions, net of overall behavioral production and behavioral self‐similarity. Our findings support the theory that groups can interact to form interpersonal synergies and indicate that information about system‐level dynamics is a viable way to understand and predict effective collaborative processes. (shrink)