A new study analyzes collaborative behaviors during task building within social virtual reality

A new study highlights the possibilities of leveraging user behaviors in virtual reality (VR) to understand the psychological and social processes underlying collaborations and demonstrate how VR can be used to investigate collaborative interactions.

The findings were featured in “Synchrony and Task Engagement in Virtual Reality: Temporal Dynamics, Predictors, and Psychological Outcomes of Collaborative Behaviors” by Eugy Han, University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications Media Production, Management, and Technology assistant professor and Stanford University scholars Portia Wang, Monique Santoso and Jeremy Bailenson. The article was published in Cognitive Science, a multidisciplinary peer-reviewed academic journal, on April 27.

According to the authors, “We leveraged a large-scale classroom VR dataset to study how immersive collaborative behaviors unfold over time, how it is shaped by individual and contextual differences, as well as its relationship with the perception of group closeness and collaborative outcomes.”

They add, “The findings revealed that collaborative behaviors such as object edit synchrony are shaped by previous XR experience, [an umbrella term for immersive technologies that blend physical and digital worlds, encompassing VR, Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR)], group size negatively predicted the frequency of object creation and that the frequency of object deletion is positively associated with perception of group closeness. Taken together, this work advances the understanding of collaborative behavior by modeling its temporal dynamics, identifying predictors and psychological outcomes, thereby demonstrating how VR enables large-scale examination of its cognitive underpinnings.”

Category: AI at CJC News, College News
Tagged: AI Eugy Han MPMT vr
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