The geometry of behavioral and brain dynamics in team coordination

Abstract

Performing a task as a team requires that team members mutually coordinate their actions. It is this coordination that distinguishes the performance of a team from the same actions performed independently. Here we set out to identify signatures of team coordination in behavioral and brain dynamics. We use dual electroencephalography (EEG) to measure brain dynamics of dyadic teams performing a virtual room clearing task. Such complex tasks often exhibit high variability of behavioral and brain dynamics. Although such variability is often considered to impede identification of the behavior or brain dynamics of interest here we present a conceptual and empirical framework which explains variability in geometrical terms and classifies its sources into those that are detrimental and non-detrimental to performing the task at hand. Using our framework we found that behaviorally team coordination is reflected in terms of role dependent behavior. Furthermore we identified a low-dimensional subspace of the brain dynamics in the frequency domain which is specific for team behavior and correlated with successful team coordination. Moreover, successful team coordination was positively correlated with the inter- but not intra-brain coherence in the gamma band. Our results hence indicate that successful team coordination is associated with increased team cognition, particularly readiness to engage in the task. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.