DETERMINING TEAM COGNITION FROM DELAY ANALYSIS USING CROSS
RECURRENCE PLOT
Nasim Hajari, Irene Cheng, Bin Zheng and Anup Basu
Department of Computing Science
Department of Surgery
University of Alberta
ABSTRACT
Team cognition is an important factor in evaluating and deter-
mining team performance. Forming a team with good shared
cognition is even more crucial for laparoscopic surgery ap-
plications. In this study, we analyzed the eye tracking data of
two surgeons during a laparoscopic simulation operation, then
performed Cross Recurrence Analysis (CRA) on the recorded
data to study the delay behaviour for good performer and poor
performer teams. Dual eye tracking data for twenty two dyad
teams were recorded during a laparoscopic task and then the
teams were divided into good performer and poor performer
teams based on the task times. Eventually we studied the de-
lay between two team members for good and poor performer
teams. The results indicated that the good performer teams
show a smaller delay comparing to poor performer teams.
This study is compatible with gaze overlap analysis between
team members and therefore it is a good evidence of shared
cognition between team members.
1. INTRODUCTION
Eye tracking technique, as an objective assessment of surgical
skill has been well documented in the literature [1]. Gaze pat-
terns have been shown to differentiate poor and elite surgeons
in several studies [2, 3, 4]. Also eye tracking can be used to
examine the workload and vigilance of surgeons [5, 6]. Video
analysis of an endoscopic cutting task performed by one vs.
two operators indicates that good team collaboration results
in superior team performance [7], and higher frequency of
anticipatory movement was noticed in dyad teams [8]. Later
on, Khan and Zheng [3] used dual eye-tracking to examine
the spatial similarity in eye-tracking between two surgeons.
Reporting level of gaze overlap is an innovative step in the
study of shared cognition between two surgeons in a laparo-
scopic team. However, people may gaze on the same spot at
different time slots. To further analyze the similarity of eye
tracking, we need to take temporal features into consideration
in addition to spatial ones.
In 2005, Richardson and Dale first used CRP to analyze
gaze similarity recorded from two different persons [9]. They
studied the relationship between a speaker and a listener
based on their eye movements, and found that the coupling
between a speakers and a listeners eye movements indicate
if the listener was engaged to the speaker or not. While the
gaze movement of the speaker was recorded, he watched a
television show and at the same time talked about it. Later,
the listener watched the same show as he was listening to
the previously recorded monologues and his gaze move-
ments was recorded too. Finally CRA was used to detect
the matching behavior between speaker and listeners gaze
movement. Marwan et al. presented a comprehensive review
on different CRP and CRA approaches [10]. One can find
an excellent MATLAB toolbox or an R package [11] to per-
form CRP analysis. CRP can be used to study the differences
between two processes or for the alignment and search for
the matching sequences of the two data series even when
the cross correlation fails or if the system is dynamic. It is
a major task to find relations or interrelations between the
time series. Linear data analysis is not suitable to analyze the
short, non-stationary and complex data series. An appropriate
method to analyze this type of data is Recurrence Plots (RP).
It has been proven that recurrence is a fundamental property
of dynamic systems, which means that after some time the
system will reach the state that is arbitrary close to the former
states and pass through a similar evolution. RP can visualize
the recurrence behavior of dynamic systems. Also, one can
perform the Recurrence Analysis (RA) based on the RP. CRP
is an extension of RP. It can help in investigating the time
dependent behavior of the two processes. The basic idea is to
compare the phase space trajectories of two processes in the
same phase space. CRP is used to study the similarity of the
two different phase space trajectories.
2. BACKGROUND
Cross Recurrence Plots (CRP) can be used to study the differ-
ence between two processes or for the alignment and search
for the matching sequences of the two data series even when
the cross correlation fails or if the system is dynamic. It is
a major task to find relations or interrelations between the
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