Tip of the Finger or Tip of the Tongue?: The Effects of Verbal Communication on Online Multi-Player Team Performance

ABSTRACTVirtual environments are increasingly being used to support team training. However, despite their growing ubiquity, less is known on how task difficulty in such environments mitigates verbal communication patterns. We report on a study investigating this research question, finding that although manipulations of task difficulty did appear to impact broad team level communication measures (e.g. how much they talked), it largely had minimal impact on team communication dynamics (e.g. the flow of communication between various roles in the teams). The implications of this study for the design of future team training environments along with the possibility of artificial agents to support team training as a novel use case are then discussed in turn.