Role Stability and Team Performance in a 4-Player Cooperative Cooking Game

The Cooperative Action Task (CAT) is a platform for studying the development of team coordination in complex dynamic task environments. Teams of four cooperate to play a cooking video game across eight 1-hr sessions. For each session, each team plays eight 5-minute games spread equally among 4 different kitchen layouts. Team members communicate using gaze cursors that display the gaze location of each player. The results of the study reveal that teams used one of two strategies to coordinate in the game. Some teams used pre-assigned roles for players to increase action predictability, while others dynamically adapted to changing task demands in the game. The teams that used the later strategy scored higher in general. Additionally, team performance was lower when teams switched between strategies across games in the same task environment.