IBR’s interest in group performance and social behavior dates back to the early 1970’s with founder Joseph V. Brady’s pioneering NASA-funded work in this area, and this research tradition continues today with support from the National Space Biomedical Research Institute as part of their Neurobehavioral and Psychosocial Factors team. IBR’s efforts in teamwork and group behavior are based in the Human Performance Laboratory (HPL) directed by Dr. Pete Roma, and focus primarily on multidisciplinary experimental investigations of environmental, psychosocial, and biological factors relevant to behavioral health, performance, and adaptation in individuals and groups.
Much of the HPL’s in-house work focuses on 3-person teams of human volunteers serving as simulated astronaut crews. Here, each crew undergoes extensive training and repeated testing over several months conducting 3-hour "missions" using our Planetary Exploration Simulation (PES) software overseen by a member of the HPL research team serving as "Mission Control." The PES is a computer-based interactive geological survey task requiring communication, coordination, and cooperation in the crews for mission success, and serves as a platform for testing a variety of operationally relevant factors in a controlled experimental model. Recent studies include assessments of task autonomy, unexpected communications outages, extended workload, and circadian factors on PES performance, psychosocial adaptation, group cohesion, and stress physiology. IBR strongly believes in the value of scientifically informed decision-making, and as such, the primary purpose of this work is to contribute to a sound empirical database for use by the international astronautics community when establishing research priorities, formulating policy, and planning and managing missions.
In addition, IBR and colleagues from the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have been aggressively developing and testing a simple, rapid, and objective computer-based assessment of voluntary cooperative behavior as an assay of social cohesion in small groups. This assay, built upon a conceptual foundation of evolutionary theory and Behavioral Economics, is better known by its current working title of the "Team Performance Task," or TPT. Initial prototype software was developed with colleagues in the Department of Information Systems at UMBC, and extensive parametric testing at IBR is informing development of sensitive testing procedures and next-generation software. Recent validation studies at IBR and in collaboration with colleagues at the Institute of Physiology at Medical University Graz (Graz, Austria, EU) confirm that the TPT can discriminate between groups of friends and groups of strangers based solely on their objective behavior in the task, and preliminary assessments in long-term PES work groups indicate that TPT behavior correlates with subjective reports of liking, respect, and voluntary social interaction with one’s teammates. The primary purpose of this work is to develop a simple and objective behavior-based tool to rapidly quantify the status of small-group environments in high-performance teams where social cohesion is critical to long-term success, including Astronaut crews, military units, medical/surgical teams, athletes, law enforcement/first responder crews, and business organizations. In addition, a well-validated TPT could be utilized in clinical settings as a standardized assessment of cooperative behavior in populations with neuropsychiatric disorders characterized by social deficits (for example, Schizophrenia, Autism spectrum, antisocial personality disorder) to elucidate the biological mechanisms mediating socially-relevant symptoms, test the efficacy of potential treatments, and document individual improvement over time.