What are you talking about?: A Cognitive Task Analysis of how specificity in communication facilitates shared perspective in a confusing collaboration task
- Yugo Hayashi, Ritsumeikan University, Ibaraki, Osaka, Japan
- Ken Koedinger, Human Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
AbstractThis study investigated how participant's specificity in sharing of information in collaborative problem solving was critical to them reaching a successful shared perspective. We analyzed participants' communication strategies in a collaborative task designed to make finding common ground challenging. We set out to better understand the difference between successful and unsuccessful collaborations by conducting a cognitive task analysis. From participants' utterances, we inferred cognitive processes associated with repeating communication moves and coded those processes as if-then production rules. We thereby specified the communication strategies used during interactions and developed a production-rule model to explain whether and how shared perspective developed or not. Our cognitive task analysis indicated that although all collaborating pairs described the objects they were seeing with a variety of features, the successful pairs were more specific in using combinations of features. Quantitatively, we found significant correlations between frequency of combined feature statements and success in sharing perspectives.