Activating, developing and maintaining effective schema in mental models of dynamic time critical team-oriented behaviour

The narrative and the application of schematic understanding, in storage and recall of information from long-term memory has been a topic of interest for many years, since the early work of Sir Frederick Bartlett (1932). More recent research on durable memories suggests that much of the information recalled is highly situation specific (Healy and Bourne, 1995) and it has been suggested that schema are re-activated by a combination of cues in the environment and generated internally by the operator from processed information (Klein, 1997). This might suggest that narratives are an effective way in which to explore acquisition of information and that normal decision making is based on the forecasting of future outcome based on speculative narratives. Examination of behaviour or choices with respect to on-going narratives should provide a probe with which to measure the available task-knowledge of teams. If one accepts these arguments then training should be more effective when teams of operators are made to explore the alternative outcomes that could be associated with the same narrative because this would strengthen links forged to less likely events and outcomes. In addition, team-training would help ensure alignment of the knowledge in different participants to reduce the need for unnecessary communication.