Projects

The goal of Dr. Gorman’s research is to understand how coordinating activities with others helps shape peoples’ thoughts, actions, and performance capabilities. His research focuses on team dynamics that occur in many settings—medicine, sports, military—that are fundamental to accomplishing a variety of human tasks. Research in Dr. Gorman’s Systems Psychology Lab seeks to understand and enhance human performance in human systems such as teams using a variety of methodologies, including communication analysis, movement and physiological data, gaze tracking, and neural approaches.

Our current research projects include:

The Team Dynamics Measurement System (TDMS) is a project funded by the Air Force Research Lab. This is a software interface under development in conjunction with scientists, engineers, and researchers across government, military, and academia. The TDMS is designed to assist Critical Care Air Transport Teams (CCATT) improve their teamwork capabilities. It uses machine learning to transcribe communications and generate communication-based analytics to provide CCATT trainers real-time feedback regarding teamwork abilities such as communication, coordination, adaptation, and leadership.
Building a generalizable team dynamics measurement framework to assess critical team dynamic competencies, including adaptive capacity, resilience, and individual influence. The framework is being used to support experiential team training modules within a synthetic training environment supported by the Generalized Intelligent Framework for Tutoring (GIFT). The goal is to assess and improve the ability of team members through objective team measurement that will integrate into the STE (Synthetic Training Environment) Experiential Learning for Readiness Framework (Goldberg et al., 2021) that incorporates virtual and augmented reality to support trainee readiness. Team-based intelligent tutoring systems must be able to monitor the team environment through communication, movement, and often physiological sensors and use this data to give productive real-time feedback (Sottilare, 2010). Our development approach combines hybrid Cognitive Task Analysis (hCTA; Nehme et al., 2006) of the training domain targeting team interaction dependencies, with Subject Matter Expert interviews to align training goals with the introduction of perturbations that interfere with normal team interactions. Perturbations are operationalized as novel situations that require adaptive team communication and coordination. Team competencies assessed using perturbation training have been found to be valid indicators of team success when transferring training to novel contexts (Gorman et al., 2010). We illustrate the process of applying our team dynamics measurement framework using Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TC3; Townsend et al., 2016; Madrid et al., 2020; Milham et al., 2017; Ross et al., 2016; Johnston, 2019) and guide how the framework can be applied to other use cases.
How AI’s feedback influences student(s)-AI teams’ learning outcomes
How trust/distrust can be spread or mitigated within teams and across teams
How the design of team task environments shape human interaction and individual performance