The race is afoot to build fully autonomous systems that equal human performance capacities, particularly for autonomous driving and navigation situations. If we are to create fully autonomous intelligent systems made to successfully interact with humans, fundamental questions pertaining to complex human cognition such as improvisatory and collaborative real-time adaptive problem-solving, decision-making, and action must be seriously addressed, solidly understood, and adequately integrated. To address such high-order human cognition, experiments can no longer be singular and reductive; instead, they must implement relevant observations from spontaneous human behavior within real-world dynamic contexts and innovate sensory-rich experimental paradigms to reliably elicit and record behavioral, physiological, and neural output. With these goals in mind, this paper's contribution is three-fold: (1) I lay out the motivating and increasingly specific theoretical factors behind original multidisciplinary cognitive behavioral research in the domain of spontaneous human-human communication dynamics within an artistic multisensory context; (2) I break down improvisatory problem-solving and decision-making processes within the performing arts (i.e. drama and music); and (3) I discuss analogous collaborative human-machine interaction situations for autonomous vehicle research and development.