Improving Common Ground Development in Surgical Training through Talk and Action

In surgical training, senior surgeons and residents rely on more than just verbal utterances to share information and coordinate their work practices - their actions also contribute to and shape the development of common ground. However, the function of actions in the grounding process and how that is interdependent with verbal utterances have not been made explicit. We have investigated actions and utterances using a dialogue act coding scheme that highlights the communicative functions of each act towards common ground development during a laparoscopic surgery. We show that utterances provide detailed information for surgeons to develop content common ground, whereas actions contribute to process common ground development. Thus, utterances and actions, by providing different forms of information, depend on each other to develop and maintain common ground. Based on this understanding, we discuss opportunities in transforming actions into perceivable knowledge on the laparoscopic display that supports effective communication and surgical training.