Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study investigated how participant’s specificity in shar-ing of information in collaborative problem solving was criti-cal to them reaching a successful shared perspective. We ana-lyzed participants’ communication strategies in a collaborativetask designed to make finding common ground challenging.We set out to better understand the difference between suc-cessful and unsuccessful collaborations by conducting a cog-nitive task analysis. From participants’ utterances, we inferredcognitive processes associated with repeating communicationmoves and coded those processes as if-then production rules.We thereby specified the communication strategies used duringinteractions and developed a production-rule model to explainwhether and how shared perspective developed or not. Ourcognitive task analysis indicated that although all collaboratingpairs described the objects they were seeing with a variety offeatures, the successful pairs were more specific in using com-binations of features. Quantitatively, we found significant cor-relations between frequency of combined feature statementsand success in sharing perspectives.