Familiarity with teammate's attitudes improves team performance in virtual reality.

Area of Science:

• Human-Computer Interaction
• Social Psychology
• Virtual Reality Studies

Background:

• Virtual reality (VR) presents unique challenges for effective communication and collaboration due to limited social and nonverbal cues.
• Previous research suggests attitude familiarity, knowing a partner's attitudes, correlates with improved relationship functioning.
• Understanding how to enhance collaboration in immersive virtual environments is crucial for workplace applications.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether increased teammate familiarity, specifically through discussing task-relevant attitudes, improves performance on a joint decision-making task in VR.
• To determine if attitude familiarity is particularly beneficial in immersive VR environments compared to desktop settings.
• To assess the impact of attitude familiarity on accuracy, information identification, and decision-making time in collaborative tasks.

Main Methods:

• Twenty workplace pairs were randomly assigned to either a Familiar or Control condition.
• The Familiar group discussed task-relevant attitudes before a joint decision-making task.
• Participants completed the task in both VR and desktop monitor environments.

Main Results:

• The attitude familiarity manipulation was successful, with Familiar pairs showing greater awareness of partners' attitudes.
• In VR, Familiar pairs demonstrated significantly higher accuracy in determining patterns and predicting future events, especially for less experienced VR users.
• No significant differences were found in information identification or self-reported communication quality; Familiar teams took longer to answer.

Conclusions:

• This study successfully manipulated attitude familiarity, demonstrating its potential to enhance collaborative performance in virtual reality.
• Increased attitude familiarity appears particularly beneficial for improving accuracy in VR, compensating for the lack of traditional social cues.
• Attitude familiarity interventions may offer a valuable strategy for improving team effectiveness in collaborative virtual work environments.