Prior experience and communication media in establishing common ground during collaboration

Prior experience and communication media in establishing common ground during collaboration Yugo Hayashi (hayashi@cog.human.nagoya-u.ac.jp) Kazuhisa Miwa (miwa@cog.human.nagoya-u.ac.jp) Graduate School of Information Science, Nagoya University Furo-cho, chikusa-ku, Nagoya, Japan Common ground Abstract In linguistics, many studies have accumulated to investigate how speakers establish common ground during conversation. Recently, research has become active on the cognitive mecha- nisms involved in how people establish common ground dur- ing conversation (Richardson & Dale, 2005). Clark and Bren- nan (1991) uses a term called Grounding as an interactive process by which communicators exchange evidence in order to reach mutual understandings. It is important to establish common ground in collaborative problem solving and deci- sion making, especially in a situation where members with different perspectives collaborate together. In this study, we investigated the nature of establishing com- mon ground during collaborative problem solving. Our goal was to investigate the following two points: (1) if the estab- lishment of common ground leads to successful problem solv- ing, and (2) how the two factors, communication experience and the richness of media, affect the establishment of com- mon ground. We conducted a psychological experiment by constructing a situation where two participants engage in a rule discovery task with different perspectives. While solv- ing the task, each of the participants confronts miscommu- nication about the other’s perspective and has to manage to overcome this situation. The results show: (1) the establish- ment of common ground actually enhances successful prob- lem solving, (2) communication experience between the mem- bers improves the establishment of common ground and as a result enhances successful problem solving, and (3) rich com- munication media also enhances the establishment of common ground and successful problem solving. The influences of the two factors, communication experience and richness of media are discussed both empirically and theoretically. Keywords: Collaborative Problem solving; Common ground; Prior experience; Communication media Factors influencing common ground Next, we discuss two important factors that may influence common ground. First, one of the important factors that influ- ence the establishment of common ground is the familiarity of a partner. For example, Fussell and Krauss (1992) investigated that the members’ relationship influences their communication strategies. The result showed that the understandings of the messages they used differed depending on their relationship. Uhler and Clark (2001) investigated methods for enhancing group discussions. The result showed that group discussions preceded by interpersonal communication were more active than those without such communication. These studies im- ply that the establishment of common ground is influenced by whether members have communication experiences or no experiences. As a second factor, it is pointed out that the establishment of common ground becomes difficult in computer mediated communication such as communication via telephone and electronic mail. According to Clark and Brennan (1991), the cost for establishing common ground is different depending on the types of media. For example, in face-to-face com- munication, people can understand the partner’s intention by focusing on the tone of their voices or by watching their facial expressions and gestures. The cost for establishing common ground is relatively small in such a situation because they can refer to multiple types of information during communication. But in communication by e-mail and chatting through the In- ternet, non-verbal interaction is prohibited and symbolic in- formation is also limited. In such a situation, the cost for es- tablishing common ground becomes large because available information is limited. This view implies that communication media also influences the establishment of common ground. Introduction In the field of cognitive science, several approaches have been used to investigate the nature of collaboration, such as field studies, psychological experiments, and computer sim- ulations. These studies have indicated that obtaining differ- ent perspectives generally promotes effective interactions in human collaborative problem solving. For example, Dun- bar (1995) investigated the usage of inductive reasoning in a scientific research group. He proposed a concept of dis- tributed reasoning where the group members achieve their goals by taking charge of different types of inference. It was also found that getting different viewpoints and strate- gies is effective in promoting explanation activities (Miyake, 1986; Okada & Simon, 1997), leading the reconstruction of the external representation (Shirouzu, Miyake, & Masukawa, 2002), and improving discovery performance by producing falsifying instances in scientific reasoning (Miwa, 2004). However, there are general difficulties in such commu- nication when people with different perspectives collabo- rate in problem solving (Hayashi, Miwa, & Morita, 2006). These difficulties are the problems of communication such as miscommunications, which often emerges in communication among different cultures. These miscommunications occur as a result of members’ different knowledge and contexts, which are brought about by their different backgrounds. In the fol- lowing, we discuss about establishing common ground as a crucial factor for overcoming the miscommunications.