Synchronous, face-to-face interactions such as brainstorming are considered essential for creative tasks (the old normal). However, face-to-face interactions are difficult to arrange because of the diverse locations and conflicting availability of people—a challenge made more prominent by work-from-home practices during the COVID-19 pandemic (the new normal). In addition, face-to-face interactions are susceptible to cognitive interference.
We employ crowdsourcing as an avenue to investigate creativity in asynchronous, online interactions. We choose product ideation,a natural task for the crowd since it requires human insight and creativity into what product features would be novel and useful. We compare the performance of solo crowd workers with asynchronous teams of crowd workers formed without prior coordination. Our findings suggest that, first, crowd teamwork yields fewer but more creative ideas than solo crowdwork. The enhanced team creativity results when (1) team workers reflect on each other’s ideas, and (2) teams are composed of workers of reflective, as opposed to active or mixed, personality types. Second, cognitive interference, known to inhibit creativity in face-to-face teams, may not be significant in crowd teams. Third, teamwork promotes better achievement emotions for crowd workers. These findings provide a basis for trading off creativity, quantity, and worker happiness in setting up crowdsourcing workflows for product ideation.
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Examining the Effects of Cognitive Assistive Agents on Team Coordination in Manufacturing Teams
This article details the motivation and design of an experiment to investigate the effects of artificially intelligent cognitive assistive agents on coordination efforts in manufacturing teams. As automation solutions become more accessible and products rapidly grow in complexity, there are significant calls to leverage abilities of both artificial agents and human workers to maximize team functioning and product output. As such, we propose an experimental design where we introduce a cognitive agent with two levels of autonomy (low, and high) into a team of participants during an assembly task. We hypothesized that cognitive assistive technologies would enhance coordination within assembly teams, leading to higher productivity and reduced errors, with initial data suggesting trends in support of these hypotheses. We seek to demonstrate the value of cognitive agents in augmenting human workers, allowing manufacturers to see the benefit of increased productivity while retaining value and relevance of human labor in the face of technological development.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10416764
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting
- Volume:
- 66
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2169-5067
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1184 to 1188
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/1071181322661401
