This is the abstract of the talk I gave yesterday in Nottingham. I was invited by Geoff Underwood and Tom Foulsham to participate in their seminars held in the psychology faculty of the university. The slides of the talk can be downloaded here.

When we are face-to-face, we can point to things around us. However, at a distance, we need to recreate a context that can help disambiguate what we mean. A map can help recreate this context. However other technological solutions are required to allow deictic gestures over a shared map when collaborators are not co-located. This mechanism is here termed Explicit Referencing.

In this talk I will present a controlled experiment where remote participants had to solve a problem collaboratively, using chat tools that differed in the way a user could relate an utterance to a shared map. Results indicated that team performance is improved by the Explicit Referencing mechanisms. However, when this is implemented in a way that is detrimental to the linearity of the conversation, resulting in the visual dispersion or scattering of messages, its use has negative consequences for collaborative work at a distance. Additionally, an analysis of the eye movements of the participants over the map helped to ascertain the interplay of deixis and gaze in collaboration. A primary relation was found between the pairŐs recurrence of eye movements and their task performance.

Finally, I will present an algorithm that detects misunderstandings in collaborative work at a distance. It analyses the movements of collaboratorsŐ eyes over the shared map, their utterances containing references to this workspace, and the availability of ÔremoteŐ deictic gestures. The algorithm associates the distance between the gazes of the emitter and gazes of the receiver of a message with the probability that the recipient did not understand the message.