Synchronization Assessment for Collective Behavior

Team cognition can be defined as the ability that humans have to coordinate with others through a complex environment. Sports offer exquisite examples of this dynamic interplay requiring decision making and other perceptual-cognitive skills to adjust individual decisions to the team selforganization and vice-versa. Considering players of a team as periodic phase oscillators, synchrony analyses can be used to model the coordination of a team. Nonetheless, a main limitation of current models is that collective behavior is context independent. In other words, players of a team can be highly synchronized without this corresponding to a meaningful coordination dynamics relevant to the context of the game. Considering these issues, the aim of this study was to develop a method of analysis sensitive to the context for evidence-based measures of team cognition.