How social cues shape task coordination and communication

To design computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) systems that effectively support remote collaboration, designers need a better understanding of how people collaborate face-to-face and the mechanisms that they use to coordinate their actions. While research in CSCW has studied how specific social cues might facilitate collaboration in specific tasks, such as the role of gestures in video instruction, less is known about how a range of communicative cues might facilitate activities across many collaborative settings. In this paper, we model the predictive relationships between facial, gestural, and vocal cues and collaborative outcomes in three different tasks, drawing conclusions on how each cue might contribute to these outcomes in a given task and how such relationships generalize across tasks. The resulting models provide a quantitative understanding of the relative importance of each type of social cue in predicting collaborative outcomes, as well as a more thorough understanding of how the role of each social cue changes across tasks. Additionally, our results provide confirmation and illumination of prior findings in face-to-face and computer-mediated communication research.