"Cognitive Psychology and Team Training: Training Shared Mental Models of Complex Systems" Teamwork has always been an important component of successful military operations. However, as the nature of military operations evolves in the post-cold war era, the ability of teams to work effectively in a dynamic and complex environment may play an even more critical role. As the nature of military organizations evolves and becomes more complex, it will be important to understand why some teams function better than others and how to instill the requisite skills in numerous geographically dispersed teams. This paper summarizes the results of several studies to describe the nature of team performance, the relationship of mental models for team performance, and several training alternatives for enhancing mental models. Mental models are useful for understanding how successful teams are able to coordinate behavior and adapt to varying conditions. The relationships implicit in these models are responsible for the ability of humans to understand phenomena, to draw inferences and make predictions, and to decide what actions to take. The authors argue that the extent of overlap or commonality among team members' mental models has an impact on team effectiveness. Overlapping mental models among team members enhance the successful use of implicit coordination strategies by allowing team members to anticipate the behavior and information needs of team members more accurately.