Tasks

Click on task 1. or 2. to see details:

1. Collaborative search task 2. Search and consensus task

1. Collaborative search task

(Find the O in a display of Qs.  First person to hit “Target present” or “Target absent” ends the trial for both)

In this task, Searchers A’s and B’s saccades are shown in red and blue, respectively, for a representative pair in each of the 4 communication conditions: Shared Gaze (A), Shared Gaze + Voice (B), Shared Voice (C) and No Communication (D).  Partners divided up the display in all conditions except No Communication; when they had Shared Gaze but could not speak, they did so by monitoring each other’s gaze cursors.



(See the full report:  Brennan, S. E., Chen, X., Dickinson, C., Neider, M., &  Zelinsky, G. (2007; In press). Coordinating cognition: The costs and benefits of shared gaze during collaborative search.  Cognition.)



















nsf This material is based upon work supported by NSF
under Grant #0527585		 hsd

Findings

(1)  Collaborative search is faster and more efficient than solitary search.  Given that search is already highly efficient, it was not clear whether communication and coordination costs would offset collaboration benefits.  However, search times were clearly faster in the SV, SG+V, and SG conditions compared to a one person (1P) search condition (with no increase in errors).  In this O-in-Qs search task, we found that four eyes are about twice as good as two.

(2)  Look where I’m not looking!  The coordination strategy underlying this collaborative benefit can be summarized as: “look where I’m not looking”.  When able to communicate, partners spontaneously choose to spatially divide the labor of the search task. 

(3)  People can communicate using only gaze.  This study produced the first evidence for true bi-directional communication between remotely located partners using only gaze cursors.  People spontaneously learned to use this new communication mode without explicit coaching or training, typically within the practice trials. 

(4)  Shared gaze is a highly efficient method of mediating collaboration in a spatial task.  Not only were searchers able to communicate using shared gaze alone, but shared gaze proved better for coordinating search than speech.  Two broad categories of factors likely contributed to this surprising advantage of shared-gaze over speech.  First, collaborators sharing gaze could probably communicate spatial information with greater precision.  Whereas searchers limited to a shared voice channel divided the display rather coarsely along the lines of “you look left, I’ll look right”, a finer-grained division of labor could be specified with shared gaze.  Second, it is possible that verbal communication carries with it a coordination cost (e.g., turn-taking, politeness, etc.).  Evidence for such a cost exists in the fact that search in the SG+V condition was less efficient than search with shared gaze alone (SG).