Communication of Visual and Auditory Information and The Coordination of Team Task Performance

Abstract

Due to lack of visual or auditory perceptual information, many tasks require interpersonal coordination and teaming. Dyadic verbal and/or auditory communication typically results in the two people becoming informationally coupled. This experiment examined coupling by using a two-person remote navigation task where one participant blindly drove a remote-controlled car while another participant provided auditory, visual, or a combination of both cues (bimodal). Under these conditions, we evaluated performance using easy, moderate, and hard task difficulties. We predicted that the visual condition would have higher performance measures overall, and the bimodal condition would have higher performance as difficulty increased. Results indicated that visual coupling performs better overall compared to auditory coupling and that bimodal coupling showed increased performance as task difficulty went from moderate to hard. When auditory coupling occurs, the frequency at which teams communicate affects performance— the faster teams spoke, the better they performed, even with visual communication available.