U. S. Army Combat Capabilities and Development Command, U. S. Army Research Lab, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2020 Oct 26;15(10):e0241011. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0241011. eCollection 2020.
Virtual reality (VR) is a potentially challenging social environment for effective communication and collaboration. Thus, we conducted a VR study to determine whether increased familiarity with a teammate would improve performance on a joint decision making task. Specifically, because attitude familiarity, or knowledge of another person's attitudes, has been correlated with better relationship functioning in the past, we anticipated that team performance would improve when teammates were first asked to discuss their task-relevant attitudes with one another. We also hypothesized that increased familiarity would be particularly useful in immersive VR, where typical social and other nonverbal cues were lacking. Twenty pairs recruited from a workplace environment were randomly assigned to either the Familiar or Control condition before completing a joint decision making task both in VR and on desktop monitors. The manipulation of attitude familiarity was successful: pairs in the Familiar condition were significantly more aware of their partners' unique task-relevant attitudes. Results found that in VR, Familiar pairs were more accurate at determining patterns to events. Additionally, for teams less experienced in VR, Familiar pairs were also more accurate at predicting future events. However, there was no meaningful statistical difference in pairs' ability to identify information. Familiar teams also took more time to answer questions, and we found no difference in self-reported communication quality. Overall, this was the first successful manipulation of attitude familiarity and results indicate that such an intervention may prove useful in a collaborative work environment, as Familiar teams demonstrated greater accuracy, especially in VR.
虚拟现实（VR）是一个对有效沟通和协作具有挑战性的社交环境。因此，我们进行了一项 VR 研究，以确定增加对队友的熟悉程度是否会提高联合决策任务的绩效。具体来说，由于过去态度熟悉度（即对他人态度的了解）与更好的关系功能相关，我们预计当队友首先被要求相互讨论与任务相关的态度时，团队表现会有所提高。我们还假设，在缺乏典型的社交和其他非言语线索的沉浸式 VR 中，增加熟悉度会特别有用。从工作场所环境中招募的 20 对参与者在完成 VR 和桌面显示器上的联合决策任务之前，被随机分配到熟悉或控制条件。态度熟悉度的操作是成功的：在熟悉条件下的参与者对他们的伙伴的独特任务相关态度的意识显著增强。结果发现，在 VR 中，熟悉的团队在确定事件模式方面更加准确。此外，对于在 VR 中经验较少的团队，熟悉的团队在预测未来事件方面也更加准确。然而，在团队识别信息的能力方面没有统计学上的显著差异。熟悉的团队也需要更多的时间来回答问题，并且我们没有发现自我报告的沟通质量有差异。总体而言，这是对态度熟悉度的首次成功操作，结果表明，这种干预措施在协作工作环境中可能会很有用，因为熟悉的团队表现出更高的准确性，尤其是在 VR 中。
