Supporting team science by coordinating cognition across levels of analysis

Background/Question/Methods: Science has long recognized the challenges associated with interdisciplinary research – from the tacit norms associated with the discipline bound university department to the difficulty inherent in communicating and collaborating across disciplines. Despite this fact, we have continually struggled with overcoming the challenges arising from interdisciplinary interaction. This is a particularly complex form of collaborative cognition where knowledge from varied fields needs to elicited and integrated. In this talk I discuss interdisciplinary research in the context of team science. I focus on how to develop a science of team science that can support a broad swath of group and team researchers such that we can examine basic and applied issues of tremendous societal importance. Second, I narrow my focus to team cognition, with particular emphasis on a multi-level theory developed to understand complex problem solving.

Results/Conclusions: I describe the macrocognition in teams framework, a multi-level model of collaboration developed to scaffold research on knowledge building and the generation of solutions to complex problems.  I provide macro and micro level perspectives on collaborative cognition to show how a multidisciplinary approach to theory and practice can contribute to our understanding of complex problems. As researchers from ecological and social sciences collaborate to solve scientific problems, attention must be paid to theories that can inform their problem solving. I focus on knowledge-building processes in science teams and illustrate how externalized cognitive representations can support theory development and empirical investigation in team science.  External cognitive representations are conceptualized as knowledge in the environment such as graphical representation, conceptual models, physical symbols, and can be used to illustrate relations between abstract and/or concrete factors. In this ways, I show how features of problems can be distributed across an individual's internal cognitive system as well as across the collaborative problem-solving context. This presentation is organized around a multi-level theoretical approach that incorporates the role of internalized and externalized team knowledge along with individual and team knowledge building process as teams move through phases of problem solving.