Measuring Implicit Spatial Coordination in Teams: Effects on Collective Intelligence and Performance

Coordinated teamwork is essential in fast-paced decision-making environments that require dynamic adaptation, often without an opportunity for explicit communication. Although implicit coordination has been extensively considered in the existing literature, the majority of work has focused on co-located, synchronous teamwork (such as sports teams) or, in distributed teams, primarily on coordination of knowledge work. However, many teams (firefighters, military, law enforcement, emergency response) must coordinate their movements in physical space without the benefit of visual cues or extensive explicit communication. This paper investigates how three dimensions of spatial coordination, namely exploration diversity, movement specialization, and adaptive spatial proximity, influence team performance in a collaborative online search and rescue task where explicit communication is restricted and team members rely on movement patterns to infer others' intentions and coordinate actions. Our metrics capture the relational aspects of teamwork by measuring spatial proximity, distribution patterns, and alignment of movements within shared environments. We analyze data from 34 four-person teams (136 participants) assigned to specialized roles in a search and rescue task. Results show that spatial specialization positively predicts performance, while adaptive spatial proximity exhibits a marginal inverted U-shaped relationship, suggesting moderate levels of adaptation are optimal. Furthermore, the temporal dynamics of these metrics differentiate high- from low-performing teams over time. These findings provide insights into implicit spatial coordination in role-based teamwork and highlight the importance of balanced adaptive strategies, with implications for training and AI-assisted team support systems.

Allocation Schemes in Analytic Evaluation: Applicant-Centric Holistic or Attribute-Centric Segmented?

Many applications such as hiring and university admissions involve evaluation and selection of applicants. These tasks are fundamentally difficult, and require combining evidence from multiple different aspects (what we term "attributes"). In these applications, the number of applicants is often large, and a common practice is to assign the task to multiple evaluators in a distributed fashion. Specifically, in the often-used holistic allocation, each evaluator is assigned a subset of the applicants, and is asked to assess all relevant information for their assigned applicants. However, such an evaluation process is subject to issues such as miscalibration (evaluators see only a small fraction of the applicants and may not get a good sense of relative quality), and discrimination (evaluators are influenced by irrelevant information about the applicants). We identify that such attribute-based evaluation allows alternative allocation schemes. Specifically, we consider assigning each evaluator more applicants but fewer attributes per applicant, termed segmented allocation. We compare segmented allocation to holistic allocation on several dimensions via theoretical and experimental methods. We establish various tradeoffs between these two approaches, and identify conditions under which one approach results in more accurate evaluation than the other.