38 research outputs found
Rising tides or rising stars?: Dynamics of shared attention on twitter during media events
"Media events" generate conditions of shared attention as many users simultaneously tune in with the dual screens of broadcast and social media to view and participate. We examine how collective patterns of user behavior under conditions of shared attention are distinct from other "bursts" of activity like breaking news events. Using 290 million tweets from a panel of 193,532 politically active Twitter users, we compare features of their behavior during eight major events during the 2012 U.S. presidential election to examine how patterns of social media use change during these media events compared to "typical" time and whether these changes are attributable to shifts in the behavior of the population as a whole or shifts from particular segments such as elites. Compared to baseline time periods, our findings reveal that media events not only generate large volumes of tweets, but they are also associated with (1) substantial declines in interpersonal communication, (2) more highly concentrated attention by replying to and retweeting particular users, and (3) elite users predominantly benefiting from this attention. These findings empirically demonstrate how bursts of activity on Twitter during media events significantly alter underlying social processes of interpersonal communication and social interaction. Because the behavior of large populations within socio-technical systems can change so dramatically, our findings suggest the need for further research about how social media responses to media events can be used to support collective sensemaking, to promote informed deliberation, and to remain resilient in the face of misinformation. © 2014 Lin et al
Telerobotic Pointing Gestures Shape Human Spatial Cognition
This paper aimed to explore whether human beings can understand gestures
produced by telepresence robots. If it were the case, they can derive meaning
conveyed in telerobotic gestures when processing spatial information. We
conducted two experiments over Skype in the present study. Participants were
presented with a robotic interface that had arms, which were teleoperated by an
experimenter. The robot could point to virtual locations that represented
certain entities. In Experiment 1, the experimenter described spatial locations
of fictitious objects sequentially in two conditions: speech condition (SO,
verbal descriptions clearly indicated the spatial layout) and speech and
gesture condition (SR, verbal descriptions were ambiguous but accompanied by
robotic pointing gestures). Participants were then asked to recall the objects'
spatial locations. We found that the number of spatial locations recalled in
the SR condition was on par with that in the SO condition, suggesting that
telerobotic pointing gestures compensated ambiguous speech during the process
of spatial information. In Experiment 2, the experimenter described spatial
locations non-sequentially in the SR and SO conditions. Surprisingly, the
number of spatial locations recalled in the SR condition was even higher than
that in the SO condition, suggesting that telerobotic pointing gestures were
more powerful than speech in conveying spatial information when information was
presented in an unpredictable order. The findings provide evidence that human
beings are able to comprehend telerobotic gestures, and importantly, integrate
these gestures with co-occurring speech. This work promotes engaging remote
collaboration among humans through a robot intermediary.Comment: 27 pages, 7 figure
The influence of conceptual (mis)match on collaborative referring in dialogue
When two dialogue partners need to refer to something, they jointly negotiate which referring expression should be used. If needed, the chosen referring expression is then reused throughout the interaction, which potentially has a direct, positive impact on subsequent communication. The purpose of this study was to determine if the way in which the partners view, or conceptualise, the referent under discussion, affects referring expression negotiation and subsequent communication. A matching task was preceded by an individual task during which participants were required to describe their conceptualisations of abstract tangram pictures. The results revealed that participants found it more difficult to converge on single referring expression during the matching task when they initially held different conceptualisations of the pictures. This had a negative impact on the remainder of the task. These findings are discussed in light of the shared versus mutual knowledge distinction, highlighting how the former directly contributes to the formation of the latter