An Operational Assessment of Team Cognition for Long Distance Space Missions

Long-duration and long-distance space missions create a complicated context for collaboration. The combination of environmental and psychosocial factors will negatively impact individual and team cognition, potentially jeopardizing mission success. To provide a richer understanding of the issues surrounding team cognition for future space exploration missions, this paper describes an operational assessment to identify the key team cognition factors most likely to affect problem solving. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to elicit team cognitive and associated factors relevant to long-duration spaceflight missions. Ten NASA employees (e.g., astronauts, mission controllers) were interviewed to provide a more complete and accurate representation of individual and team cognitive demands. Our goal was to explicate critical cognitive processes associated with team effectiveness in space missions and provide guidance on technology and training collaborative problem solving for space missions.