Capturing the Dynamics of Trust and Team Processes in Human-Human-Agent Teams via Multidimensional Neural Recurrence Analyses

As collaborative technologies evolve from supportive tools to interactive teammates, there is a growing need to understand how trust and team processes develop in human-agent teams. To contribute effectively, these systems must be able to support human teammates in a task without disrupting the delicate interpersonal states and team processes that govern successful collaboration. In order to break down the complexity of monitoring multiple actors in human-agent collaborations, there is a need to identify interpretable, generalizable measures that can monitor the emergence of interpersonal and team-level processes that underlie effective teaming. We address this gap by using functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy to concurrently measure brain activity of two individuals in a human-human-agent team during a complex, ecologically valid collaborative task, with a goal of identifying quantitative markers of cognition- and affect-based trust alongside team processes of coordination, strategy formulation, and affect management. Two multidimensional extensions of recurrence quantification analysis, a nonlinear method based in dynamical systems theory, are presented to quantify interpersonal coupling and team-level regularity as reflected in the hemodynamics of three cortical regions across multiple time-scales. Mixed-effects regressions reveal that neural recurrence between individuals uniquely reflects changes in self-reported trust, while team-level neural regularity inversely predicts self-reported team processes. Additionally, we show that recurrence metrics capture temporal dynamics of affect-based trust consistent with existing theory, showcasing the interpretability and specificity of these metrics for disentangling complex team states and processes. This paper presents a novel, interpretable, and computationally efficient model-free method capable of differentiating between latent trust and team processes a complex, naturalistic task setting. We discuss the potential applications of this technique for continuous monitoring of team states, providing clear targets for the future development of adaptive human-agent teaming systems.