Alison Newlands

The Effects of Visibility on Dialogue and Performance in a Cooperative Problem Solving Task

This study compares task outcome and various dialogue parameters between situations in which task participants either could or could not see each other. The results establish that the visibility of ones conversational partner improves information transfer and the management of turn taking in a transactional problem solving task. The greater efficiency of the dialogues between participants who could see each other was attributed to the exchange of visually transmitted, non-verbal signals. attempting to compensate for the lack of this additional channel of communication, pairs of subjects who could not see each other demonstrated flexibility and versatility in communicating. They interrupted their partners more frequently and used more back channel responses to provide their partners with increased verbal feedback. The analysis of one specific non-verbal behaviour, gaze, for a subsample of the dialogues, suggested that gaze plays a role in aiding communication.

Impact of video-mediated communication on simulated service encounters

The results are reported of three studies of collaborative problem-solving in a simulated travel agency where communication between travel agent and customers is supported by a videolink and shared multimedia tools. The video-mediated contexts (VMCs) were compared with face-to-face and audio-only interactions in terms of the success of the task outcome, the process of communication and decision making and user satisfaction. VMC did not deliver the same benefits as face-to-face interactions. The possible reasons for this are explored as well as the implications of the data for evaluation techniques.

Limited visual control of the intelligibility of speech in face-to-face dialogue

Speakers are thought to articulate individual words in running speech less carefully whenever additional nonacoustic information can help listeners recognize what is said (Fowler & Housum, 1987; Lieberman, 1963). Comparing single words excerpted from spontaneous dialogues and control tokens of the same words read by the same speakers in lists, Experiment 1 yielded a significant but general effect of visual context: Tokens introducing 71 new entities in dialogues in which participants could see one another’s faces were more degraded (less intelligible to 54 naive listeners) than were tokens of the same words from dialogues with sight lines blocked. Loss of clarity was not keyed to momentto-moment visual behavior. Subjects with clear sight lines looked at each other too rarely to account for the observed effect. Experiment 2 revealed that tokens of 60 words uttered while subjects were looking at each other were significantly less degraded (in length and in intelligibility to 72 subjects) vis-à-vis controls than were spontaneous tokens of the same words produced when subjects were looking elsewhere. Intelligibility loss was mitigated only when listeners looked at speakers. Two separate visual effects are discussed, one of the global availability and the other of the local use of the interlocutor’s face.

Dialog Structure and Cooperative Task Performance in Two CSCW Environments

Face-to-face communication is the most frequently used form of communication in general, and the mode of communication most often used for collaboration. In recent years, however, many new forms of communication technology have been developed, such as fax, e-mail, video phones and video conferencing. While these technologies can be used to support Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), research is required to observe what effects they have on communication and collaboration. In this chapter we will describe two studies carried out to investigate two very different forms of technology mediated communication used in supporting collaborative work.