Mental models are an important theme within information systems. They show how people understand reality, make decisions and how the information flows in order for them to do so. It is particularly challenging to make such decisions when it comes to determining the health of someone, making it a particularly delicate matter. In that context, this thesis takes BetterDoc as object of study. It is an organization situated in Cologne, Germany, with an increasingly positive record of providing remote healthcare services and allowing patients to have the adequate treatment for their condition. The study was based on the theory of mental models to bring to light the implicit patterns present in making decision in that context. That was done by conducting qualitative interviews with the staff of the organization, across different teams, and synthetizing the findings in a common model that shows points of decision and the supporting information. Those findings are useful for identifying points that need to be structured to provide clarity and understanding, increasing the synergy and transparence of a socio-technical system that can influences the outcomes of healthcare for many people.

Remembering negative experiences with extreme heat may promote future protective actions and provide insight to improve heat risk awareness and communication practices. This two-part thesis found 1) that experiencing heat-related health symptoms predicted what Americans would do to protect themselves and others during subsequent heat waves; and 2) that Utah professionals regard heat-related experience as an important factor in how they responded to extreme heat events. In the first study, a US national survey showed that personal experience with heat-related health symptoms was related to the tendency to say that one engaged in different protective behaviors, while other factors like risk perception and temperature were less related to self-reported behaviors. Sociodemographic factors such as age, race, and gender were related to Americans’ reported efforts to check on other people during a heat wave—with African-Americans, women, and older adults being more likely to do so— but did not have much relationship with how people personally protect themselves. The second study found that heat experience was an important factor in how public officials and media broadcasters manage extreme heat situations. Interviews of professionals in Utah revealed that experience with heat impacts influenced public forecasters, practitioners, and media members alike in their heat risk decisions and messaging practices even though official heat risk communication products in Utah were somewhat unfamiliar. This study also found that public forecasters recently changed how they measure extreme heat to better communicate the dangers of dry heat in the Intermountain West. This change will likely cause more official heat alerts to be issued in this region.

Secure email systems that use end-to-end encryption are the best method we have for ensuring user privacy and security in email communication. However, the adoption of secure email remains low, with previous studies suggesting mainly that secure email is too complex or inconvenient to use. However, the perspectives of those who have, in fact, chosen to use an encrypted email system are largely overlooked. To understand these perspectives, we conducted a semi-structured interview study that aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the mindsets underlying adoption and use of secure email services. Our participants come from a variety of countries and vary in the amount of time they have been using secure email, how often they use it, and whether they use it as their primary account. Our results uncover that a defining reason for adopting a secure email system is to avoid surveillance from big tech companies. However, regardless of the complexity and accuracy of a person's mental model, our participants rarely send and receive encrypted emails, thus not making full use of the privacy they could obtain. These findings indicate that secure email systems could potentially find greater adoption by appealing to their privacy advantages, but privacy gains will be limited until a critical mass are able to join these systems and easily send encrypted emails to each other.

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Gestures and speech have been intertwined since the beginning of human communication. Recently the role of gestures in cognition and learning has become a topic of interest in both cognitive and educational psychology. Some researchers have speculated that gestures inherently communicate information that is not provided in purely verbal communication, and that this supplemental information can lead to more thorough mental models in the receiver by acting on a physical/motor modality in addition to the two modalities proposed in the dual code hypothesis. To further understand this issue, in this study, we examined the effects of watching a gesturing or a non-gesturing lecturer on the learner*s cognitive load and mental model development. The results have implications for cognitive psychology as well as educational psychology, particularly in multimedia learning.

The purpose of this study was to empirically test the oft-noted hypothesis that shared mental models lead to implicit coordination. Specifically, this dissertation investigated the underlying mechanisms of implicit coordination and how different aspects of shared mental models affect the process. The research questions tested in this study were (a)how perceptions of sharedness affect the initiation of implicit coordination, (b) how actual levels of sharedness affect the process of implicit coordination, and (c) how quality of task mental models affects successful implicit coordination. Sixty same-gender, two-person teams engaged in a complex military reconnaissance planning task in which the team members were required to work together by exchanging information to plan routes for one unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and one unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). The results provided partial support for the influence of different facets of shared mental models on the process of implicit coordination. Specifically, individual mental model quality, not perceptions of sharedness or actual mental model sharedness, was the biggest predictor of the initiation of implicit coordination. Additionally, perceptions of sharedness and actual mental model sharedness interacted with one another, such that teams in mismatched conditions (high perceptions of sharedness but low actual sharedness [false consensus], or low perceptions of sharedness and high actual sharedness, [pluralistic ignorance]) tended to increase their communications. The implications and recommendations for future research on implicit coordination and shared mental models are discussed. Additionally, the implications for operators of unmanned vehicles are also discussed.

Organizations across work domains that utilize teams to achieve organizational outcomes experience change. Resources change. Project deadlines change. Personnel change. Within the scientific community, research has recently surged on the topic of team adaptation to address the issue of change specifically within teams. There have generally been two lines of research regarding team adaptation (task and membership). This effort is focused on membership. Teams are not static— members come and go. The membership adaptation literature has traditionally focused on the performance effects of newcomers to teams. Yet in practice, more and more teams today experience membership loss without replacement. Military units are stretched to capacity. Economic conditions have forced organizations to do more with less. When members leave, they are rarely, if ever, replaced. The very nature of some organizations lends itself to fluid team memberships. Consider an emergency room where a team of nurses and doctors work on Patient A. When a more critical Patient B arrives that requires the expertise of one of those team members, that doctor will leave the Patient A to tend to the Patient B. This practice is common in such work environments. Yet despite the prevalence of this practice, the scientific community knows very little about the impact of losing members on team performance. The current study examines the impact of membership fluidity on team performance. The purpose of this study was twofold. First, there was the need to address an empirical gap in the adaptation literature by focusing on membership changes (loss and loss with replacement) in non-creative tasks. Second was the consideration of the processes underlying adaptation—namely learning, operationalized as the development of effective shared mental models (SMMs). Thus, a primary goal was to determine the magnitude of team performance decrements associated with such changes within a decision-making task as well as the associated changes in team process. Results suggest that three-person intact teams demonstrated greater adaptive performance iv than membership loss with replacement teams. Furthermore, two-person intact teams developed more similar task and team interaction SMMs than membership loss teams when SMMs were indexed as a Euclidean distance score. There were no differences in the level of sharedness regarding task, team interaction or teammate SMMs for three-person intact teams as compared to membership loss with replacement teams. However, when teammate SMMs were operationalized as the personality facets (i.e., the Big 5) in exploratory analyses, three-person intact teams did develop more similar SMMs regarding the agreeableness facet than membership loss with replacement teams. Additionally, when operationalized as Euclidean distance, the agreeableness facet significantly predicted adaptive team performance—specifically, the smaller the distance (i.e., more similar the MMs), the greater the adaptive performance in teams. When operationalized as the similarity index, the neuroticism facet significantly predicted adaptive team performance such that the more similar the SMMs, the greater the adaptive performance in teams. Results suggest that membership fluidity does negatively influence the development of shared mental models among teammates. Furthermore, this study provides additional evidence that teammate and team interaction mental models, which are typically not examined together in team studies, are differentially influenced by membership fluidity and differentially predict outcomes like adaptive team performance. This suggests researchers should include both of these cognitive components of team performance to fully understand the nature of these constructs.

This thesis seeks to advance interaction design practice by exploring the potential of interactive tangible prototypes to enhance university students' understanding of abstract programming structures, such as loops. It addresses prevalent challenges, including the difficulties students encounter when initially learning about loops, and scalability issues inherent in tangible teaching tools within this research area. Two distinct tangible learning methodologies are considered: unplugged programming and tangible computing. The primary contributions of this thesis lie in the creation of innovative tangible learning tools, the emphasis on the scalability of such tools, and the illumination of how physical prototypes can inspire digital software design.

People with serious mental illnesses (SMIs) (e.g., schizophrenia, major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder) receive inadequate medical care, which is associated with high rates of avoidable morbidity and premature mortality. Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) is an evidence-based service delivery model that provides intensive mental and social health support to clients with SMI. It has been suggested that ACT should provide primary care services to address client physical health, however, initiatives towards this and their implications are not well understood. I used a case study approach and semi-structured interviews to explore five ACT teams in the Ottawa region to discover team members’ mental models of primary care, relationships with external primary care providers, and the perceived impact COVID-19 has had on these mental models. I used Shared Mental Model (SMM) theory to frame data collection and a thematic analysis. The results showed that ACT team members similarly perceived primary care as important for the holistic health of their clients. They described ACT’s psychosocial scope and how they support clients’ access to external primary care services and their work to mitigate barriers. Teams did not share mental models about the basic primary care services they provided or which roles delivered them, due to differences in context and team members’ comfort. Team members also did not share beliefs about the future of ACT and primary care integration. Finally, the COVID-19 pandemic changed and challenged primary care delivery, with beliefs becoming more negative overall. This thesis provides insight into how primary care could be delivered to ACT clients and where challenges and improvements can be addressed.

Coaching (professional, business, executive, leadership) has been shown to be effective generally speaking, but questions remain regarding the explanatory mechanisms underlying coaching. I first propose a context-general model that unpacks the sociocognitive dynamics within coaching. The model explains the emergence of different types of coaching relationships, and how the nature of these relationships differentially determine coaching outcomes. Research and theory on social identity construction and information processing in dyads provides the foundation upon which I outline a model describing the process and dynamics of coaching identity emergence. Beyond this emergence, my proposed model states that the coachee's understanding of appropriate interpersonal relations and division of labor between coach and coachee (i.e., his/her situated coaching identity or coaching structure schema) should partially dictate the focus and depth of the coachee's information processing during a coaching engagement. Past research has shown information processing to be a key determinant of decision-making and goal commitment, both of which are desirable outcomes within the coaching domain. To explore these issues, I developed a coaching exercise which simulated some of the early aspects of business, leadership, or executive coaching. During this simulation, participants were guided through a process which enabled them to think and talk about their strengths and weaknesses when using different conflict management behaviors. In discussing these aspects of conflict management, participants and coaches (i.e., trained research associates) walked through a supplementary process to facilitate the development of a series of goals (an "action plan") that would enable the participant to improve his or her conflict management behaviors. At the end of the coaching session, participants were asked to what extent they felt committed to the goals they had developed and whether or not they expected them to be efficacious. Throughout the coaching session, participants were also asked at designated break points to report their levels of information processing and their understanding of the coaching structure schema for that particular coaching relationship. The experimental manipulation was presented at the beginning of the session, wherein the coach would explain to the coachee what the ideal nature of coaching should be. These explanations varied in terms of ascribing responsibility and division of labor - either to a generic coaching process, to the skill and ability of the coach, to the creativity of the participant, or to the joint interaction between coach and participant. Among other things, I hypothesized that coaching structure schemas that emphasized the participant's role in the coaching process would encourage more information processing, and consequently higher levels of goal commitment. Hypotheses were largely confirmed, showing that information processing and coaching structure schemas are important predictors of goal commitment at the end of one coaching session. The effects of the manipulation were mixed. Claiming behaviors - that is, the coach ascribing responsibility for coaching effectiveness to him/herself - were only marginally effective in shaping participants' coaching structure schemas. Granting behaviors - communicating to the participant that they are responsible for coaching effectiveness - were much more effective in facilitating helpful information processing and driving higher levels of goal commitment. One possible explanation for the relative effectiveness of granting over claiming may be that claiming requires a degree of credibility which the coach (again, a trained research associate) had not attained with the participants. Other findings pertain to: (1) the unique variance that independent measures of coach- and coachee-relevant structure schemas contribute to models predicting information processing and goal commitment, (2) the importance of identifying the type or focus of coachee information processing, and (3) the role that psychological mindedness may play in characterizing a more "coachable" coachee. Implications include: (1) measuring coachees' coaching structure schemas, (2) intentionally encouraging a more appropriate schema, (3) measuring coachees' psychological mindedness prior to coaching, and (4) dynamically monitoring coachees' schema and their information processing in order to assure better coaching effectiveness. Future researchers should explore ways to enact these implications and also to further explore the theoretical components of these practical implications, such as: (1) measurement methods for better assessing coaching schemas and information processing, (2) what the ideal timings are for different kinds of coaching schemas, and (3) different ways to encourage maximally adaptive and appropriate coaching structure schemas.