Coordination Cost and Super-Efficiency in Teamwork: The Role of Communication, Psychological States, Cardiovascular Resp
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Coordination Cost and Super‑Efficiency in Teamwork: The Role of Communication, Psychological States, Cardiovascular Responses, and Brain Rhythms Ben Hoyle1,2 · Jamie Taylor1 · Luca Zugic1,2 · Edson Filho1,2
© The Author(s) 2020
Abstract To advance knowledge on the psychophysiological markers of “coordination cost” in team settings, we explored differences in meta-communication patterns (i.e., silence, speaking, listening, and overlap), perceived psychological states (i.e., core affect, attention, efficacy beliefs), heart rate variability (i.e., RMSSD), and brain rhythms (i.e., alpha, beta and theta absolute power) across three studies involving 48 male dyads (Mage = 21.30; SD = 2.03). Skilled participants cooperatively played three consecutive FIFA-17 (Xbox) games in a dyad against the computer, or competed against the computer in a solo condition and a dyad condition. We observed that playing in a team, in contrast to playing alone, was associated with higher alpha peak and global efficiency in the brain and, at the same time, led to an increase in focused attention as evidenced by participants’ higher theta activity in the frontal lobe. Moreover, we observed that overtime participants’ brain dynamics moved towards a state of “neural-efficiency”, characterized by increased theta and beta activity in the frontal lobe, and high alpha activity across the whole brain. Our findings advance the literature by demonstrating that (1) the notion of coordination cost can be captured at the neural level in the initial stages of team development; (2) by decreasing the costs of switching between tasks, teamwork increases both individuals’ attentional focus and global neural efficiency; and (3) communication dynamics become more proficient and individuals’ brain patterns change towards neural efficiency over time, likely due to team learning and decreases in intra-team conflict. Keywords Group dynamics · Team coordination · Heart rate variability · EEG Different theoretical frameworks have been used to study teamwork across domains. From an evolutionary perspective, teamwork allows for super-efficiency in the natural world (Anderson and Franks 2001). That is, the outputs of teamwork are often greater than the sum of individuals’ outputs, akin to the gestalt notion that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. Super-efficiency occurs because teamwork allows for adaptive specialization or division of labour (Duarte et al. 2012). Indeed, research has shown that social insects (e.g., ants and bees) rely on division of labour to generate greater outputs (Anderson and Franks 2001), geese * Edson Filho [email protected] 1
School of Psychology, University of Central Lancashire, Darwin Building 114, Preston PR1 2HE, UK
Social Interaction and Performance Science (SINAPSE) Lab, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK
2
migrate in flocks to conserve energy by catching each other’s updrafts (Weimerskirch et al. 2001), and wolf and lion packs engage in adaptive specialization (e.g., stalking and ambush) to take d
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