Shared mental models and intra-team psychophysiological patterns: a test of the juggling paradigm

ABSTRACT

We explored implicit coordination mechanisms underlying the conceptual notion of “shared mental models” (SMM) through physiological (i.e., breathing and heart rates) and affective-cognitive (i.e., arousal, pleasantness, attention, self-efficacy, other’s efficacy) monitoring of two professional jugglers performing a real-time interactive task of increasing difficulty. There were two experimental conditions: “individual” (i.e., solo task) and “interactive” (i.e., two jugglers established a cooperative interaction by juggling sets of balls with each other). In both conditions, there were two task difficulties: “easy” and “hard.” Descriptive analyses revealed that engaging in a dyadic cooperative motor task (interactive condition) required greater physiological effort (Median Cohen’s d = 2.13) than performing a solo motor task (individual condition) of similar difficulty. Our results indicated a strong positive correlation between the jugglers’ heart rate for the easy (r = .87) and hard tasks (r = .77). The relationship between the jugglers’ breathing rate was significant for the easy task (r = .73) but non-significant for the hard task. The findings are interpreted based on research on SMM and Theory of Mind. Practitioners should advance the notion of “shared-regulation” in the context of team coordination through the use of biofeedback training.

KEYWORDS:

• Shared mental models
• group dynamics
• juggling
• team coordination
• psychophysiology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Association for Applied Sport Psychology (Grant Scheme 2013), the National Circus School, Cirque du Soleil, and the Biofeedback Federation of Europe.