SoCS: Enhancing Immersive Social Perspective Taking and Perceived Virtual Similarity to Enable Intelligent Social Relationships

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

Virtual learning environments are proliferating, yet the social interactions between learners in these contexts remain challenging. Cues (such as gestures) that facilitate reading other people in face-to-face contexts are absent in many virtual environments. However, these contexts can endow participants with communicative capabilities that are not possible face-to-face. Because social interactions and relationships are pivotal to an array of outcomes, we need to facilitate interpersonal communication in these contexts. This research will conduct four experiments to capitalize on the affordances of computer mediated learning environments to improve the relationships participants from within them. These experiments will examine undergraduate and middle-school learners who are learning about complex causality within ecosystems. In each study, relationships between learners will be improved through transformed social interactions, an approach in which participants are endowed with capabilities for navigating their social world that humans do not normally possess. Specifically, participants will be able to take the perspective of other participants and to increase their similarity to other participants. Intellectual Merit. This study makes important intellectual contributions through experimentally testing ways to improve learners' relationships, examining the impact of these interventions on learning and motivation (and affective outcomes), and advancing the state of the art in non-verbal signals in computer-mediated communication. Potential Broader Impacts. Because of the proliferation of online learning communities, the capacity for these environments to involve a diverse cross-section of students, and the novel, widely-replicable, computational approach, these studies may have broad impact across the fields of education, communications, and computer science.