Abstract
Mediated communication in sociotechnical systems is quite common but the effects of long audio delays remain unexplored. In the current study, two-person teams (N=67) completed a modified NASA Multi-Attribute Task Battery with closed-loop audio communication delays 0 to 16 seconds in length. In addition to a joint fuel management task, each team member had simultaneous responsibility for either a compensatory tracking or a system monitoring task. As communication delay increased, performance on the joint task degraded in a cubic fashion while individual tasks were unaffected. These results imply that audio communication delay degrades team performance in a non-linear fashion while simultaneous tasks not requiring communication are unaffected. Implications for the design of sociotechnical systems with long audio communication delays are discussed.