Conversational effectiveness in multimedia communications

Oregon Graduate Institute reports a laboratory experiment that compared three different communications modalities (face‐to‐face, audio‐only, and audio and video) across two co‐operative tasks, which can be characterized as visual and non‐visual. In each task, effectiveness varied as a significant function of modality. However, the directions of these functions were opposite. That is, for the visual task conversants were more effective in the face‐to‐face and audio and video modalities than in the audio‐only modality; for the non‐visual task, conversants were more effective in the audio‐only modality than in the face‐to‐face modality. Additional analysis of the non‐visual tasks suggests that modality affects the extent to which asymmetry of knowledge results in asymmetry of influence between conversants.