Two Many Cooks: Understanding Dynamic Human-Agent Team Communication and Perception Using Overcooked 2

This paper describes a research study that aims to investigate changes in effective communication during human-AI collaboration with special attention to the perception of competence among team members and varying levels of task load placed on the team. We will also investigate differences between human-human teamwork and human-agent teamwork. Our project will measure differences in the communication quality, team perception and performance of a human actor playing a Commercial Off The Shelf game (COTS) with either a human teammate or a simulated AI teammate under varying task load. We argue that the increased cognitive workload associated with increases task load will be negatively associated with team performance and have a negative impact on communication quality. In addition, we argue that positive team perceptions will have a positive impact on the communication quality between a user and teammate in both the human and AI teammate conditions. This project will offer more refined insights on Human AI relationship dynamics in collaborative tasks by considering communication quality, team perception, and performance under increasing cog-