When it comes to the interaction between humans and machines, it is clear that people develop an understanding of how machinery works. This understanding, or mental model, guides how the individual interacts with machines. Cognitive psychologist Philip Johnson-Laird used this term to describe a reasoning process that could be applied to practical problems. He argued that mental models help people draw conclusions about how things work, deduce the relationship between units, and predict outcomes. The notion of mental models has since been widely used to describe internal cognitive representations of complex systems.

During the late 1980s, interest in team performance increased dramatically, due in part to several well-publicized incidents that were attributed to faulty teamwork (e.g., the downing of a commercial airliner by the Navy's USS ...