Planning to Forget: A Simulation of Cognitive Workload in Emergency Response Teams

Emergency response teams have to decide fast on appropriate actions to be taken under high cognitive workload and stress. Psychological research shows that their ability to cope with workload to avoid critical mistakes depends—besides other variables—on whether a team assigns its tasks to predominantly specialist members or whether all team members are generalists having the same responsibilities. Specialist team members can forget information while generalists are more flexible in handling their tasks. Thus, organizationally successful forgetting means to strike a balance between these opposing poles. To that end, this chapter introduces an agent-based social simulation approach for designing and evaluating the distribution of responsibilities in teams. This approach helps identify which amount of forgetting is required and feasible to reduce cognitive workload and avoid mistakes. The chapter integrates a psychological measure for workload as well as heuristic decision-making into the Beliefs-Desires-Intentions agent architecture as a technological foundation. It evaluates the performance of specialist and generalist teams in a simulated fire fighting scenario as an example setting. That scenario is used for both a psychological laboratory experiment to calibrate the agent-based model and an agent-based simulation study. The results show that the model fits well-known properties of human cognition and is capable of plausibly representing the effects of cognitive workload and their interaction with team compositions in social simulation. Hence, it can be utilized to identify suitable team configurations and plan re-organization processes to leverage intentional forgetting in teamwork.