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Navigation is critical for everyday tasks but is especially important for urban search and rescue (USAR) contexts. Aside from successful navigation, individuals must also be able to effectively communicate spatial information. This study investigates how differences in spatial ability affected overall performance in a USAR task in a simulated Minecraft environment and the effectiveness of an individual’s ability to communicate their location verbally. Randomly selected participants were asked to rescue as many victims as possible in three 10-minute missions. Results showed that sense of direction may not predict the ability to communicate spatial information, and that the skill of processing spatial information may be distinct from the ability to communicate spatial information to others. We discuss the implications of these findings for teaming contexts that involve both processes. 

The goal of the Space Challenge project is to identify the challenges faced by teams in space operations and then represent those challenges in a distributed human-machine teaming scenario that resembles typical space operations and to measure the coordination dynamics across the entire system. Currently, several challenges have been identified through semi-structured interviews with nine subject matter experts (SMEs) who were astronauts or those who have experienced or have been involved with interplanetary space exploration. We conducted a thematic analysis on the interviews through an iterative process. Challenges were categorized into four categories, including, communication, training, distributed teaming, and complexity. Based on the findings, challenges and key teamwork characteristics of space operations were integrated into the initial scenario development. In addition to the scenario, we plan to use dynamical system methods to analyze team activity in real time.