The interactions among media and psychological functions on video-mediated communication

The study assesses whether remotely located pairs of people working on a collaborative task benefit from using video or not. We look in particular at people's psychological functions as well as the sound delay time. In this study, we extend the research on video mediated communication (VMC) to the domain of interactions of psychological functions. Fourty-eight pairs of students performed a map task using either audio-only or audio-plus-video for communication. Half the pair were in the condition with 20 ms sound delay, half were in the condition with 1000 ms sound delay. We found a significant interaction among communication media, the sound delay time, and the subjects' psychological functions. Although as in many studies of video connectivity, no benefit from the video was found in four experimental conditions, the results indicate that video might matter when audio connectivity has a longer sound delay. Video connectivity might decrease the difference of task performance in two sound delay conditions. These results have important implications for people who have some types of psychological functions to communicate in different communication media conditions. Video connectivity may be beneficial for communication quality.