Just finished reading Nicolas’ research plan, which focus on the impact of location awareness on collaboration. His hypothesis is that the underlying mechanism that impact on the collaboration performances is Mutual Modelling: the construction, made by each partner of the other partners’ beliefs, knowledge and goals.

His previous research (Nova et al, 2003) showed as maintaining a model of the partner’s position enables the other partner to infer what s/he is doing or what s/he is going to do.

Therefore, the inference process has a very central role in the collaboration. May it be that Mutual Modelling enables for faster and more efficient inferences?

Are there studies connected with the way people make inferences using spatial information?

References:
[Nova et al.2003] Nova, N., Wehrle, T., Goslin, J., Bourquin, Y., and Dillenbourg, P. (2003). The impacts of awareness tools on mutual modelling in a collaborative video-game. In Favela, J. and Decouchant, D., editors, Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Groupware, pages 99–108, Autrans, France.