Shared Mental Models - A Conceptual Analysis

The notion of a shared mental model is well known in the literature regarding team work among humans. It has been used to explain team functioning. The idea is that team performance improves if team members have a shared understanding of the task that is to be performed and of the involved team work. We maintain that the notion of shared mental model is not only highly relevant in the context of human teams, but also for teams of agents and for human-agent teams. However, before we can start investigating how to engineer agents on the basis of the notion of shared mental model, we first have to get a better understanding of the notion, which is the aim of this paper. We do this by investigating which concepts are relevant for shared mental models, and modeling how they are related by means of UML. Through this, we obtain a mental model ontology. Then, we formally define the notion of shared mental model and related notions. We illustrate our definitions by means of an example.