Using Visual Information for Grounding and Awareness in Collaborative Tasks

Abstract

When pairs work together on a physical task, seeing a common workspace facilitates communication and benefits performance. When mediating such activities, however, the choice of technology can transform the visual information in ways that impact critical coordination processes. In this article we examine two coordination processes that are impacted by visual information—situation awareness and conversational grounding—which are theoretically distinct but often confounded in empirical research. We present three empirical studies that demonstrate how shared visual information supports collaboration through these two distinct routes. We also address how particular features of visual information interact with features of the task to influence situation awareness and conversational grounding, and further demonstrate how these features affect conversation and coordination. Experiment 1 manipulates the immediacy of the visual information and shows that immediate visual feedback facilitates collaboration by improving both situation awareness and conversational grounding. In Experiment 2, by misaligning the perspective through which the Worker and Helper see the work area we disrupt the ability of visual feedback to support conversational grounding but not situation awareness. The findings demonstrate that visual information supports the central mechanism of conversational grounding. Experiment 3 disrupts the ability of visual feedback to support situation awareness by reducing the size of the common viewing area. The findings suggest that visual information independently supports both situation awareness and conversational grounding. We conclude with a general discussion of the results and their implications for theory development and the future design of collaborative technologies.

Notes

¹Situation awareness serves as the underlying theoretical construct of interest. However, a related construct is Gutwin and Greenberg's (2002) notion of workspace awareness which can be considered a “specialization of situation awareness, one that is tied to the specific setting of the shared workspace” (p. 417).

² Discriminability refers to how easy it is to linguistically differentiate one object from the others based on its visual features, whereas codability refers to how easy it is to initially describe or name an object (Hupet, Seron, & Chantraine, 1991).

³As evidenced in the previous studies, the lack of shared visual space should affect both situation awareness and conversational grounding.

⁴There is another form of conversational grounding that occurs with respect to the references used for piece placement. The possibility that these differences are due to grounding for a different purpose (i.e., piece placement) is addressed with the targeted content analysis presented in Section 5.2.

Acknowledgments. We thank Daniel Avrahami, Susan Brennan, Gail Kusbit, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and feedback on drafts of this manuscript. We also thank Lynne Horey, Kathleen Geraghty, and Patti Bao for their work on the content analysis, and research assistants Lisa Auslander, Kenneth Berger, Megan Branning, Sejal Danawala, Darrin Filer, James Hanson, Matthew Hockenberry, John Lee, Gregory Li, Katelyn Shearer, and Rachel Wu for their support in developing the experimental apparatus, collecting the data, and performing behavioral coding.

Support. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (IIS-#9980013, #0705901, #0953943). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF.

HCI Editorial Record. First manuscript received October 17, 2005. Revisions received June 16, 2010, and April 15, 2011. Accepted by Steve Whittaker. Final manuscript received September 8, 2011. — Editor