Abstract
<p>Emergency response team members must have aligned and compatible mental models of the incident they are handling and of the work the team is doing. Being able to monitor team members’ mental model similarity during performance may allow a team leader to direct the team’s work in a way that increases team cognition. The current study collected data during 14 scenario training sessions for second-line emergency response teams (N = 134 participant recordings). The similarity of team member mental models about incident and teamwork were measured at freeze-points during scenario performance. In a preregistered replication of a previous finding, we found that mental models were more consistent within than between teams, indicating that some teams had better team cognition. We also developed and field-tested a team cognition monitoring tool, which presented real-time calculation of the team’s mental model similarity. At freeze-points during the exercise we provided half the team leaders with a report about the similarity of their team’s mental models at that point. Aligned with preregistered hypotheses, the teams achieved more similar mental models (when excluding the team role with most variation) when the leader could monitor the similarity. This indicates that similarity reports could be used to evaluate and enhance team cognition in emergency response teams, and team leaders could benefit from real-time monitoring of the team’s mental model similarity.</p>