A novel joint decision making paradigm for assessing team coordination was developed and tested using baseball infielders. Balls launched onto an infield at different trajectories were filmed using four video cameras that were each placed at one of the typical positions of the four infielders. Each participant viewed temporally occluded videos for one of the four positions and were asked to say either “ball” if they would attempt to field it or the name of the bag that they would cover. The evaluation of two experienced coaches was used to assign a group coordination score for each trajectory and group decision times were calculated. Thirty groups of 4 current college baseball players were: (i) teammates (players from same team/view from own position), (ii) non-teammates (players from different teams/view from own position), or (iii) scrambled teammates (players from same team/view not from own position). Teammates performed significantly better (i.e., faster and more coordinated decisions) than the other two groups, whereas scrambled teammates performed significantly better than non-teammates. These findings suggest that team coordination is achieved through both experience with one’s teammates’ responses to particular events (e.g., a ball hit up the middle) and one’s own general action capabilities (e.g., running speed). The sensitivity of our joint decision making paradigm to group makeup provides support for its use as a method for studying team coordination.

Careful considerations in designing and organizing information for restaurant point-of-sale (POS) systems can affect user experience. Unfortunately, usability guidelines are sparse for these systems. Applications from other studies, such as categorical organization and F-shape, are implemented in an experimental interface as a starting point of discussion. A control interface was designed after the default version of NCR Aloha’s POS program: Aloha Table Service. Novice and expert order taking strategies were also observed to compare input differences. This study examined selection time, total time, and selection accuracy across both order and interface types. The results show that time and number of key presses are significantly reduced under the treatment interface, and that teaching expert order taking strategies to novice users may help reduce cognitive load.