The current paper presents a study on the subjective evaluation of an advanced telecommunication platform aimed at informal home use, called the PhotoShare tele-application. This platform enables users to view photos (e.g., family or holiday snapshots) together, while the presenter and the viewer are at different, remote locations. The platform includes a common viewing space where the photos are displayed and selected, as well as an audio connection and a large-screen video connection for communication between the remote sites. The study investigated the effects of videocommunication on social presence. In addition, the ability to point at a picture with an electronic pointer was evaluated. In the context of presence research, the current study also provided information regarding the validity of the IPO Social Presence Questionnaire (IPO-SPQ), which was specifically designed to investigate social presence with telecommunication applications. The results indicated that adding broadband, life-size video communication significantly increased social presence. In addition, we found a significant effect of sex on social presence: women gave substantially higher social presence ratings than men. The absence of a significant effect of the pointing function indicated that extensive workspace functionality may be of minor importance to the user's feeling of social presence.
The idea of aiding as cognitive support is to offer the user the knowledge he or she is missing. Recently, we developed a design method for aiding that is based on explicit requirements of the human problem solver. This proved to be able to supplement a lack of human knowledge in a statistical analysis task. In this article we extend the aiding concept to time-pressured tasks and we investigate whether aiding can supplement lack of knowledge and capacity under tasks with high mental loading, such as dealing with irregularities in process control. We developed a simulator of the workplace of a railway traffic controller with an aiding function for dealing with irregularities (e.g., a switch getting out of order). Application of the design method proved to be possible for this task. We then conducted an experiment to study effects of the aiding on task performance, mental effort, and learning under low and high task load Mark A. Neerincx is a ps chologist with an interest in the development of B user interfaces that provi e cognitive support; he is a Researcher in the Human-Machine Interface oup of the TNO Human Factors Research Institute in Soesterberg, The Ne t r erlands. H. Paul de Greef is a ps chologist with an interest in cooperative problem solving and agent mo d eling; he is a Researcher in the
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