I See You: Examining the Role of Spatial Information in Human-Agent Teams

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Awareness, and specifically, spatial awareness, has long played a pivotal role in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work research in both theory and design. This significant background gives awareness the ability to answer challenges facing human-agent teams in communication and shared understanding. As such, the current study investigates the effects of spatial information level (low, high) on the development of team cognition and its outcomes in varying compositions of human-agent teams (human-human-agent, human-agent-agent) versus human-only (human-human-human) teams. The mixed-methods study had teams complete several rounds of the NeoCITIES emergency response management simulation and complete various team cognition and perception measures, followed by qualitative free-response questions. The study found that human-only teams did not perform at the same level as human-agent teams, with multi-agent human-agent teams having the best performance. A significant interaction, though with inconclusive simple main effects, displayed the trend that human-agent teams had better team mental model similarity when spatial awareness was high rather than low, while human-only teams experienced the reverse trend. Qualitative findings identified that high spatial awareness jump-started team cognition development, fostered more accurate shared mental models, enhanced the explainability of the agent, and helped the iterative development of team cognition over time.