social interaction theory research paper

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• Review Article
• Published: 12 January 2022

A review of theories and methods in the science of face-to-face social interaction

• Lauren V. Hadley   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6587-3644 1 ,
• Graham Naylor   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1544-1944 1 &
• Antonia F. de C. Hamilton   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8000-0219 2  

Nature Reviews Psychology volume  1 ,  pages 42–54 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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For most of human history, face-to-face interactions have been the primary and most fundamental way to build social relationships, and even in the digital era they remain the basis of our closest bonds. These interactions are built on the dynamic integration and coordination of verbal and non-verbal information between multiple people. However, the psychological processes underlying face-to-face interaction remain difficult to study. In this Review, we discuss three ways the multimodal phenomena underlying face-to-face social interaction can be organized to provide a solid basis for theory development. Next, we review three types of theory of social interaction: theories that focus on the social meaning of actions, theories that explain actions in terms of simple behaviour rules and theories that rely on rich cognitive models of the internal states of others. Finally, we address how different methods can be used to distinguish between theories, showcasing new approaches and outlining important directions for future research. Advances in how face-to-face social interaction can be studied, combined with a renewed focus on cognitive theories, could lead to a renaissance in social interaction research and advance scientific understanding of face-to-face interaction and its underlying cognitive foundations.

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Acknowledgements

L.V.H is supported by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship (MR/T041471/1). G.N. is supported by the Medical Research Council (MR/S003576/1) and the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government. A.F.C.H. was supported by the Leverhulme Trust (RPG-20160-251).

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Hadley, L.V., Naylor, G. & Hamilton, A.F.d.C. A review of theories and methods in the science of face-to-face social interaction. Nat Rev Psychol 1 , 42–54 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-021-00008-w

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REVIEW article

Studying social interactions through immersive virtual environment technology: virtues, pitfalls, and future challenges.

• 1 Department of Organizational Behavior, Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
• 2 Bern University of Applied Sciences, Bern, Switzerland

The goal of the present review is to explain how immersive virtual environment technology (IVET) can be used for the study of social interactions and how the use of virtual humans in immersive virtual environments can advance research and application in many different fields. Researchers studying individual differences in social interactions are typically interested in keeping the behavior and the appearance of the interaction partner constant across participants. With IVET researchers have full control over the interaction partners, can standardize them while still keeping the simulation realistic. Virtual simulations are valid: growing evidence shows that indeed studies conducted with IVET can replicate some well-known findings of social psychology. Moreover, IVET allows researchers to subtly manipulate characteristics of the environment (e.g., visual cues to prime participants) or of the social partner (e.g., his/her race) to investigate their influences on participants’ behavior and cognition. Furthermore, manipulations that would be difficult or impossible in real life (e.g., changing participants’ height) can be easily obtained with IVET. Beside the advantages for theoretical research, we explore the most recent training and clinical applications of IVET, its integration with other technologies (e.g., social sensing) and future challenges for researchers (e.g., making the communication between virtual humans and participants smoother).

Humans spend between 32 and 75% of their waking time in social interactions ( Mehl and Pennebaker, 2003 ). To understand how we behave in social interactions, how we draw conclusions about our social interaction partners, or how the outcome of the social interaction will shape us and our social relationships, we need to observe and study humans engaged in a wide variety of different social contexts. Given the frequency of its occurrence and the importance of social interactions for understanding humans and for bringing about change for individuals and society, the lack of research using direct behavioral observation is surprising ( Baumeister et al., 2007 ). One reason for this gap is that if we focus on natural observation, we may have to wait long periods of time before a desired social situation occurs naturally with us being present to observe it. In an attempt to overcome these constraints, researchers typically use simulations, meaning that people are put in a specific social situation from which their behavior is observed and the interaction outcomes assessed. In the present review, we describe how such simulations can take place in an immersive virtual environment (IVE) with virtual humans as social interaction partners and we discuss the distinct advantages and challenges of this method.

In this article, we focus on social interactions with virtual humans in the IVEs and their use for research and training. While IVET has been around for several decades, the use of this technology for the social sciences is still relatively new ( Fox et al., 2009 ) and particularly the aspect of including virtual humans as social interaction partners to simulate interpersonal encounters is still in its infancy. It is the latter aspect on which we will shed light by describing the state of the art in this domain, some of the main findings, and the existing challenges and future directions of this line of research. Our contribution is at the same time an update of the earlier review by Fox et al. and a focalization on the simulation of social interactions with virtual humans.

The Need for Standardized Social Interaction Partners

For researchers studying how people behave in social interactions, one of the biggest challenges is that the behavior of one person is always, at least in part, a function of the behavior of his/her social interaction partner. If my social interaction partner smiles a lot, then I tend to respond in kind ( Hatfield et al., 1992 ). Typically, social scientists studying interpersonal behavior are interested in investigating why one person behaves differently from another person – known as the study of individual differences. Such differences become hard to interpret if they are affected by what the social interaction partner does. There are different solutions to this problem of non-independence of the observational data in social interactions. One possibility is to include the interaction partner’s behavior as a control variable in the statistical analysis. This is not an optimal solution because the “contamination” of a person’s behavior by another person’s behavior occurs simultaneously through different channels (e.g., verbal and non-verbal) and the behavioral cues are often very subtle and hard to observe and measure. Moreover, it is unclear which out of the many different behaviors a person shows would have to be assessed in order to be able to control for.

The optimal solution is the standardization of the social interaction partner, meaning that the social interaction partner behaves exactly in the same way with each and every participant. With the standardization of the social interaction partner, differences in the behavior of a series of participants can be attributed entirely too actual differences among these people and not to anything their social interaction partner did.

One approach to standardization is the use of trained confederates. These are actors that are instructed and trained to maintain the same verbal and non-verbal reactions across participants and across conditions. Interacting with confederates (that the participants believe to be regular other participants) has high ecological validity because it is an interaction between two humans. However, in terms of standardization, it does not ensure that all behaviors are entirely controlled, especially if one considers non-verbal behavior (e.g., facial mimicry) that is much less under conscious control than, for instance, verbal behavior. Indeed, research ( Congdon and Schober, 2002 ; Topal et al., 2008 ) shows that confederates still behave slightly differently depending on whom they are interacting with and this has an influence on participants’ behavior (see Kuhlen and Brennan, 2013 for a discussion on this topic).

Another experimental setting used to circumvent the issues associated with the inter-dependence of the behavior in a social interaction involves the use of vignettes. In vignette studies, participants are provided with a cover story or with cues (e.g., a picture) describing an interaction partner in a particular situation. Participants are asked to imagine being in an interaction with that partner. This setting has the advantage of maximally controlling the behavior of the social interaction partner (maximal standardization) to the detriment of ecological validity. These studies are quite far removed from real-life interactions and might thus find results that cannot be generalized to or might not be valid for real-life situations.

Typically, the methods high in ecological validity (e.g., social interactions with confederates) are low on standardization and the methods high in standardization (e.g., social interactions with a person described in a vignette) are low on ecological validity. Using virtual humans in an IVE provides us with the best of both worlds: high ecological validity and high standardization ( Blascovich et al., 2002 ). Thus, IVEs presents a valuable possibility to overcome the issues we discussed above. In addition, using a virtual simulation of an interaction enables researchers to easily replicate the studies, which is important especially for those domains, such as social psychology, in which replication is lacking ( Blascovich et al., 2002 ).

Virtual Humans in IVEs

A virtual human is a computer-generated three-dimensional digital representation that looks and acts like a real human. Blascovich et al. (2002) differentiates between human-avatars (virtual humans controlled by humans) and agent-avatars (virtual humans controlled by computers). In the present article, we use the generic term virtual humans.

The first attempts of using virtual humans as social interaction partners became possible in the 90s. These technologies consisted of a desktop computer in which one or more virtual human interaction partners were displayed and could interact with the participant (e.g., provides information, answer standardized questions). Whereas this method constituted an improvement in terms of standardization, realism was still quite low and, as a consequence, the implications of any findings obtained were limited. This changed at the turn of the new millennium with the advancement of technology and the increased processing power of computers, making it possible to incorporate virtual humans in IVEs.

Immersion in the Virtual

Immersive virtual environment technology means that a person is fully immersed in a virtual world in which he or she can walk and look around as in the real world. The basic setup of IVET is the following: (1) the physical movement (e.g., head turning) of a participant is tracked (e.g., via an infrared camera), (2) the perceptual information of the virtual world is updated according to those movements through computer-based calculations, and (3) the perceptual information (e.g., visual information displayed through head-mounted displays) is sent back to the participant ( Blascovich et al., 2002 ). Even though in principle any kind of sensory feedback can be provided to participants, most of the studies on social interactions focused on visual and auditory information, which is typically sent through the head-mounted display (or projected to the physical walls of a room, as in so-called CAVE systems) and headphones or speakers.

We refer to immersion as the objective amount and quality of the perceptual input provided to participants through technological instruments ( Mantovani and Castelnuovo, 2003 ), such as the 3D visual input. Also, the degree of immersion in the virtual world and in the interaction with virtual humans can be manipulated by providing more or less sensorial information to the participants. As an example, IVET is more immersive than desktop virtual reality because it provides more sensorial inputs. We use presence as it refers to the participants’ subjective feeling of “being there,” interacting with their own body in a virtual world that is perceived as real ( Heeter, 1992 ; Ijsselsteijn et al., 2001 ; Schuemie et al., 2001 ). It can be operationalized as the correspondence of participants’ reactions and emotions between a real and a virtual situation and can be measured in different ways (e.g., physiological responses, behavioral measures, and self-assessment). The literature is quite inconsistent in terms of the different definitions of presence and immersion. Some authors refer to the former as “psychological immersion” ( Palmer, 1995 ) and to the latter as “perceptual immersion” ( Biocca and Delaney, 1995 ). Other authors define immersion as a subjective feeling ( Fox et al., 2009 ), as the degree of “realness” of participants’ behavior (which, as explained above, we rather consider as an operationalization of presence), or use the terms presence and immersion interchangeably. In our view, immersion is a determinant of feeling of presence. In Freeman et al.’s (1999) study, participants watching motion scenes in 3D reported higher feelings of presence when compared to 2D. Kober et al. (2012) found that EEG activity in parietal areas of the brain was correlated with feelings of presence and was higher when participants were involved in a highly immersive virtual reality environment compared to a desktop version of the same task. Even though research has shown that virtual reality can evoke a strong feeling of presence, and especially so in immersive virtual environments, the intensity of those reactions are not as pronounced as in real world situations ( Jacobson, 2001 ). Importantly, feeling of presence in IVEs can be improved by using virtual humans as social interaction partners ( Slater et al., 2006b ). Copresence is an aspect of presence that implies the feeling of being there, in the same virtual space, together with virtual humans. As a consequence, individuals feel that virtual partners are “available” and can either influence or be influenced by them ( Lee, 2004 ). Social presence is a broader concept than copresence as it does not require sharing the same virtual space ( Lee, 2004 ). As we will show in the next sections, the use of virtual humans in IVEs represents a powerful social interaction simulation method.

Realistic Looking Virtual Humans

High ecological validity can also be achieved by using virtual humans that look realistic and behave in a realistic way. Technological advances have improved the graphic quality and the motion animation of virtual humans dramatically over the past decade. The virtual humans available to date are very convincing. Typically, the better the esthetic representation of a human and the closer to a real human the human representation comes, the more acceptable the human representation is to an observer, engendering more natural reactions from the observer ( Blascovich, 2002 ; Slater and Steed, 2002 ). However, at a certain point of similarity, an observer’s reaction can be of revulsion, only to return to something more positive when the virtual human becomes more distinguishable from a real human. This is called the uncanny valley effect ( Mori, 1970 ). With the increased realism in virtual humans we become less likely to accept features that deviate from actual human features. That is, unless the representation is absolutely “perfect,” we will pick up on subtle abnormalities in the representation which makes us respond in an adverse way. Indeed, participants have an unpleasant impression of highly realistic (although not perfect) virtual humans as opposed to more caricature-based avatars ( Seyama and Nagayama, 2007 ). To illustrate, a brisk and unnatural hand movement in a very simplistic virtual human would be less surprising and can be attributed to the crudeness of the simulation of the virtual human. However, if an almost perfect virtual human shows the same gesture; observers are bothered and they try to find out what is wrong with the virtual human, which then reduces its perceived realism and participants’ copresence. Even though there are many anecdotal examples about the uncanny valley , the effect has not been systematically studied in an IVE. Overall, studies using IVET and other methodologies (e.g., videoclips, desktop virtual reality) show that virtual humans are reported as odd or eerie when there is a perceived mismatch between their high-quality “physical” appearance and their behavior, such as their gaze behavior ( Garau et al., 2003 ) or their facial expressions ( Tinwell et al., 2011 ).

Are Virtual Social Interactions Similar to Real Social Interactions?

Despite the relatively high ecological validity of IVET-based social interactions, they still remain virtual. One might therefore wonder whether social interaction behavior shown with virtual humans in IVEs is similar to what people would do in real world interactions. Bailenson et al. (2003) measured the interpersonal distance that participants maintained while approaching a virtual human who engaged them in mutual gaze as compared to a virtual human who did not look at the participants. Results show the same behavioral pattern found in real social interactions ( Argyle and Dean, 1965 ; Patterson et al., 2002 ): when the social interaction partner (the virtual human) looked at the participants, the latter maintained greater interpersonal distance than when the social interaction partner was not looking at them.

In the same vein, Hoyt et al. (2003) used IVET to replicate classic social psychology findings on social inhibition. They trained a group of participants in a specific task and subsequently asked them to perform it either in the presence of virtual humans or alone. In accordance with the classic social inhibition finding ( Buck et al., 1992 ), participants performed worse when in the presence of virtual humans. Relatedly, the presence of a social interaction partner often increases arousal in real social interactions ( Patterson, 1976 ) and the same was true in an IVE. Slater et al. (2006b) found that participants had higher arousal, measured through physiological responses such as heart-rate and galvanic skin response, when they were in a virtual environment with virtual humans present (i.e., a bar) compared to a lone training session in the IVE. Also, the closer the virtual human approached participants, the higher their physiological arousal ( Llobera et al., 2010 ).

Giannopoulos et al. (2010) investigated handshakes by asking participants to take part in a virtual cocktail party. They had to shake virtual humans’ hands by using a haptic device controlled either by an algorithm created to produce realistic movements or by a real human. Results showed that virtual handshakes operated by a robot were rated similarly as handshakes operated by humans. Dyck et al. (2008) used the Facial Action Coding System ( Ekman and Friesen, 1978 ) to artificially create facial expressions of six basic emotions on virtual humans that closely matched those displayed by real actors. Specific facial action units used in natural expressions were implemented in virtual humans. Results showed that virtual facial expressions of emotions displayed by virtual humans were overall recognized as accurately, and for some emotions (i.e., sadness and fear) even more accurately, as natural expressions displayed by real human actors. This study suggests that virtual humans can be reliably used to communicate emotions, although some technical advancement is needed to improve the perceived quality of some specific emotions (e.g., disgust). In the same vein, Qu et al. (2014) asked participants to have a conversation with a virtual woman who displayed either positive or negative facial expressions both while speaking and listening to the participants. Results showed that the emotions (positive or negative) displayed by the virtual woman during the interaction, and especially in the speaking phase, evoked a congruent emotional state in the participants. The same effect was observed in real social interactions ( Hess and Blairy, 2001 ; Hess and Fischer, 2013 ). Santos-Ruiz et al. (2010) adapted the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST; Kirschbaum et al., 1993 ), a task typically used to induce acute social stress, to an IVE. As in the original version of the TSST, participants had to deliver a speech addressing their own good and bad qualities. The virtual human audience changed attitude from interested to restless. Following the speech participants performed an arithmetic task (to continuously subtract 13 starting from a given number) and were informed that after an error they would have to start over. Electrodermal responses and increased salivary cortisol levels in the participants were in line with those found in previous research outside IVEs ( Kelly et al., 2007 ).

The engagement in the virtual situation and the extent to which participants perceive the virtual social interactions as real differ among individuals. Typically, the feeling of presence is measured in participants in order to check whether it affects the results obtained. This could be used to discard participants who were for one reason or another not engaged enough in the virtual world or did not have the feeling of being there, which, based on our decade long experience in virtual reality, has very rarely happened. For correlational research it is, however, important to assure that the findings are not due to the fact that some people felt more presence than others. Research shows that individual differences in feelings of presence typically do not affect the results. For instance, in a scenario in which participants were in the role of a patient ( Schmid Mast et al., 2008 ), they behaved differently when interacting with a dominant vs. a non-dominant physician. Importantly, the degree to which they were engaged in the virtual encounter – their feeling of presence – did not affect the results. In the same vein, Hartanto et al. (2014) used IVET to induce social stress in participants through job interviews with two virtual humans. They reported that differences in presence among participants did not affect feelings of stress.

In summary, there is evidence that subjective feelings, behavioral, and physiological reactions during interactions with virtual humans are very similar to those shown during interactions with real humans. IVET-simulated interactions are therefore a dependable manipulation that can be considered a proxy of real life interactions. In the next section, we discuss some of the main advantages of using virtual humans and IVEs for studying social interactions.

Why Use Virtual Humans in IVEs?

The standardization of the social interaction partner is useful for social psychology studies because all the observed variance among participants can fully be attributed to them, or to a previous manipulation, and is not due to or affected by the social interaction partner’s behavior. Interacting with virtual humans in IVEs has also three other distinct advantages. First, it enables the researcher to manipulate something in the environment or about the virtual social interaction partner and then to observe how this manipulation affects the participant’s interaction behavior and/or interaction outcomes. Second, IVEs provide a means of exposing the participant to social interactions that may well be impossible in real life. Third, virtual humans in IVEs are a relatively low-cost and effective solution to train participants or clinical populations in different tasks.

Manipulation of the Virtual Environment and the Virtual Human

Using a standardized simulation of a social interaction with virtual humans and IVEs provide the opportunity to subtly manipulate something in the virtual environment or the virtual human to test the effect of this change on the social interaction. Creating such controlled conditions are crucial for the discovery of causal relationships among variables and for disentangling the single or joint effects of different aspects of the environment or the social interaction partner on the way a social interaction unfolds. To illustrate, Latu et al. (2013) asked participants to deliver a persuasive speech in front of a group of virtual humans. The experimental manipulation centered around a picture hanging on a wall of the virtual room facing the speaker. Female participants showed improved speech performance when the picture displayed a female role model (i.e., Hillary Clinton, Angela Merkel) compared to a male role model, or when no picture was presented. Importantly, the virtual humans maintained the same non-verbal behavior across all participants, which enabled the researchers to conclude that the obtained effect was based solely on the experimental manipulation.

Moreover, the reaction of the public itself can be manipulated in order to study the effect on participant’s behavior. Pertaub et al. (2002) involved participants in a public speaking situation in which they had to deliver a speech in front of a neutral, a positive, or a bored audience composed of eight virtual humans. Unsurprisingly, they found that the negative/bored audience provoked higher levels of anxiety in participants. Overall, in studies involving a public speaking situation, IVEs are a worthy option not only because of the experimental control they afford but also because recruiting a group of actual humans would be time and cost intensive.

Alternative manipulations to virtual scenarios could involve changes to the virtual humans so as to test whether this manipulation affects the participant’s behavior in a social interaction. The use of virtual humans in IVEs enables us to disentangle variables that, in real life, are often interwoven and to study their respective effect on an outcome variable. For example, female doctors typically have a more caring and empathic communication style when interacting with their patients than male doctors ( Roter et al., 2002 ). If we want to test the effect of women doctors and of a caring and empathic communication style independent of each other, we have to be able to vary them independently. We did so in a study in which we had female and male virtual doctors use either a caring or non-caring combined with either a dominant or non-dominant communication style and measured the participants’ satisfaction with the (virtual) consultation ( Schmid Mast et al., 2008 ). Results showed that female patients were particularly satisfied with female doctors who adopted a gender-congruent, thus caring communication style whereas patient satisfaction for female doctors was unaffected by the dominance dimension. Satisfaction with the male doctors was unaffected by either communication style.

In a social situation, we react to the other person’s verbal and non-verbal behavior and also to the other person’s appearance. The effect of these different pieces of information can also be varied independent of each other when virtual humans are used. The same virtual human can, for instance, provide the same spoken information to all participants but differ in the non-verbal information depending on the condition participants are in. For instance, there could be two versions of the virtual human, one that has an expansive and animated body posture and one that has a constricted and rather immobile posture, while holding the spoken information the virtual human delivers constant. In such a setting, researchers could investigate how body language, specifically, affects the social interaction partner. This manipulation would be extremely difficult to obtain when using trained confederates. Indeed, Bailenson and Yee (2005) used a similar paradigm to study the effect of body posture mimicry of virtual humans on participants’ ratings of verbal information and of the general impression made by the virtual humans. Virtual humans delivered a persuasive speech to participants while either mimicking the participant’s body position with a delay of 4 s or while performing prerecorded body movements. Participants rated mimicking virtual humans more positively and their speeches as more persuasive compared to non-mimicking virtual humans. Likewise, Vinayagamoorthy et al. (2008) found that the body posture position of a virtual human providing information to participants played an important role on the perception of affective states of the virtual human. Participants interacting with virtual humans displaying anger reported that their body posture was the primary source of information to detect their emotional state.

Moreover, while the verbal and non-verbal behavior is kept constant, researchers can manipulate the physical appearance of a virtual human in order to test its influence on participants’ behavior. In Dotsch and Wigboldus (2008) ’s study, Caucasian participants approached virtual humans with either White or Moroccan facial features. Participants maintained a bigger interpersonal distance to Moroccan-like virtual humans and the effect was moderated by their implicit negative associations toward this group.

Impossible Real-World Social Interactions in the Virtual

Another advantage of using IVET to study interactions is that situations and manipulations that would be impossible in real life can be created. Although ecological validity of such experiments are by definition low, they can help to understand how different variables interact with each other and advance our theoretical understanding of human cognition and behavior. To illustrate, participants can be embodied (i.e., own or control a virtual body from a first person perspective) in any virtual human with any specific characteristics and this can have an effect on interaction outcomes. The psychological and behavioral effects due to the embodiment of people in a particular virtual human are known as the Proteus effect ( Yee and Bailenson, 2007 ). Yee and Bailenson (2007) made participants adopt more or less attractive virtual humans and found that participants assigned to attractive virtual humans approached more closely other virtual humans. In a second study, participants performed a negotiation task while embodying taller or shorter virtual humans. Participants assigned to taller avatars behaved in a more confident way during the interaction. The method researchers typically use to provide visual feedback about the physical appearance of the virtual human that participants embody is to locate a virtual mirror in the IVE ( Yee and Bailenson, 2007 ). The virtual mirror reflects the real body movements of the participants while the appearance can be rendered in any form.

Many physical appearance manipulations of the virtual human are possible, including gender, race, age, and body size. Importantly, manipulating people’s appearance changes their cognitions, possibly by associating the self with concepts related to other groups ( Maister et al., 2015 ). In this sense, virtual embodiment could be used as an alternative to priming manipulations. As an example, Peck et al. (2013) showed that embodying white participants into dark-skinned avatars reduced their implicit racial bias. Kilteni et al. (2013) found that participants embodied in a dark-skinned and casual-dressed virtual human improved their drumming skills. Given the rather explicit nature of embodiment, some caution should be used in order to avoid social desirability effects (e.g., participants might respond according to what they think it is expected from them).

Another example of manipulations that would be impossible to test in a real life situation is when extreme or complex social behaviors and cognitions are involved. For instance, Slater et al. (2006a) replicated the well-known study by Milgram (1963) in an IVE in which participants administer electric shocks to interaction partners. The results were comparable to the real world study, namely that participants tend to obey to orders from authority figures to the extent of administering severe electric shocks that could endanger another person’s life.

A collaborative virtual environment (CVE) is yet another example of how real world social scenarios can be incorporated into the virtual. In these settings the actual humans do not need to be in the same physical space but can remotely embody an avatar and interact with peers. This manipulation was used by Bailenson et al. (2005) in a study on augmented gaze in which three participants were present in the scenario. One of the participants read a persuasive message to the other two participants. Importantly, the gaze of the reader was manipulated in order to be perceived by the listeners as either natural or transformed. In the transformed condition, listeners perceived the reader as either looking always or never at them. When readers fixated the listeners, the latters rated their message as more persuasive and showed better recall of it. In Bente et al. (2007) ’s study, dyads of participants were involved in interactions while being embodied in virtual humans. Interaction partners were shown with the real partner’s gaze behavior or with a manipulated gaze, displaying either longer or shorter eye contact. Participants showing manipulated longer direct gaze were evaluated more positively by their interaction partners. The advantages of CVEs are that feeling of presence and copresence are high (i.e., participants are involved in an interaction with a human partner) and that very specific behaviors can be rendered non-realistically (the so-called transformed social interactions) and thus the consequences of these individual manipulations can be investigated.

Training with Virtual Humans in IVEs

Simulation of social interactions is not only important for research purposes but also for training. For instance, virtual humans can either function as tutors and give performance feedback or they can be used as specific social interaction partners necessary for training. For example, the virtual human can be a recruiter asking the participant job interview questions and the participant trains on giving good answers and making a favorable first impression. The great advantage of using virtual humans for training is that they are constantly available and do not need to be trained, scheduled, or paid. Bailenson et al. (2008 , Study 1), for instance, trained participants in Tai Chi movements using a virtual teacher. Participants reported a more enjoyable learning experience when they had the possibility to see themselves performing next to their teacher performing the movements compared to a condition in which they could see only the teacher. This finding indicates that some features of the interaction, such as having the possibility to compare one’s own movements to those of the teacher, play a crucial role in the learning outcome.

Poeschl and Doering (2012) modeled a virtual audience from real audience data that can be used to provide feedback in fear of public speaking training. Batrinca et al. (2013) also developed an audience composed of virtual humans that can provide feedback online to presenters about their performance. The advantage of using virtual humans is especially important for trainings such as learning how to speak in front of large audiences. It is now possible to simply program a large audience populated with virtual humans without having to recruit many people to be stooges as audience ( Harris et al., 2002 ; Pertaub et al., 2002 ; Thalmann, 2006 ). However, there are investment costs of setting up an IVE laboratory and the programming of the virtual humans and environments. The development of portable systems is a promising venue to make virtual reality more accessible to practitioners.

Immersive virtual environment technology-based training has already been used in clinical settings. Park et al. (2011) created an IVET version of the traditional social skills training based on role-playing. Schizophrenic patients assigned to the IVE condition improved their conversational skills and assertiveness more than patients in the traditional role-playing group, however, the latter was more effective in emotion expression skills. Perez-Marcos et al. (2012) proposed an approach of neurorehabilitation for patients with reduced mobility based on virtual interactions with healthcare providers who are not in the same physical space. Patients and healthcare providers communicate remotely through a multisensory IVE and through haptic devices located at both sites that enable them to interact (see, hear, and touch) as in a real consultation. Some of the proposed tasks are cooperative, meaning that the patients and the doctor need to perform an action together and simultaneously in order to achieve a goal (e.g., cooperate to lift a virtual object). This kind of task increases patients’ feelings of copresence. This system enables the doctors to evaluate patients with motor deficits (e.g., through force feedback) or with neuropathic pain in upper limbs. In addition, a person-to-person interaction with a real doctor, even though remote, could increase motivation of patients to pursue rehabilitation programs and could help patients who are often socially isolated because of their reduced mobility to meet other people (e.g., doctors, nurses, or other patients) in a virtual environment.

Communication with Virtual Humans

One of the biggest challenges in using virtual humans as social interaction partners is to achieve natural communication (e.g., free speech conversation) between participants and virtual humans. In most of the studies to date, the communication from the virtual human to the participant needs to be mediated by the experimenter. So the experimenter listens to what the participant says and then decides when and what the virtual human should respond. Moreover, the virtual human can only respond with behaviors or statements that have been programmed beforehand. Thus, virtual humans’ responses might not be precisely adjusted to participants’ utterances or to the tone of the conversation. As a result, the prosody, the syntax, or the word choice might not sound natural, hampering the flow of the communication. Even though research in IVEs on this topic is scarce, researchers studying interactions with confederates tried to address this issue by adapting scripts to real life conversations. Brown-Schmidt (2012) analyzed and coded conversations between two people who had to collaborate to correctly arrange pieces in a visual game. Based on occurring frequency of different types of answers (e.g., acknowledgment, repetitions) obtained through this analysis, confederates were instructed to use specific answer forms in a subsequent experiment. Likewise, in a picture description task, Branigan et al. (2007) instructed confederates to replicate errors (e.g., use of inappropriate verbs) that were made by naïve speakers in a previous similar task. Similar procedures inspired by real life conversations could be used to make conversations between virtual and real humans more smooth. Even though these methods might improve perceived realism of the communication, they do not assure an optimal adaptation to participants’ utterances.

Another possibility to achieve natural communication is to use confederates to embody virtual humans ( Bailenson et al., 2005 ). Confederates can control the body position of the avatar (non-verbal behavior of the avatar could be standardized to some extent) while communicating in a natural way with participants. This solution would improve communication realism but it is not optimal because vocal non-verbal behavior of confederates might change across participants and therefore influence them, the detrimental effects of which have already been highlighted above.

Part of the reasons why achieving a realistic communication with virtual humans is problematic is that participants can potentially address them with any kind of utterance. One possibility is to “script” the conversation and to provide the participant with prompts so that the conversation flows more naturally. As an example, Schmid Mast et al. (2008) investigated participants in the role of patients interacting with virtual doctors in a virtual medical consultation. Participants were briefed about their symptoms and there were 16 turns between the virtual doctor and the patient and for each turn, the patient had a prompt card instructing him/her what information to deliver to the virtual doctor (e.g., talk about your symptoms, for how long you have had them and how much they affect your daily life). This ensured a smooth flow of the conversation but it was unnatural because no spontaneous remarks or questions were allowed. Another approach was tested by Qu et al. (2013 , Study 2). They used a priming procedure to induce participants to use specific keywords when addressing virtual humans. They exposed participants to videos and pictures hanging on a wall in a virtual room, in which a virtual human asked them four questions on different topics. For example, when the topic was France, a picture of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris hung on a wall behind the virtual human in the priming condition, whereas only distractor pictures were displayed in the control condition. Results show that participants named the content of the videos and pictures significantly more often compared to a condition in which their content was not related to the question asked by the avatar. This priming procedure is promising because it could be combined with automatic keywords recognition and therefore enable virtual humans to respond in appropriate ways to human participants. For instance, when a participant is primed to use a specific keyword and he/she indeed says it during a virtual interaction, this keyword is automatically recognized by the system and triggers a specific response or behavior by the virtual human.

Automatic Extraction of Participant Interaction Behavior in IVEs

Participant interaction behavior in IVEs is sometimes the dependent variable because the behavioral observation is the goal. The use of IVET makes it possible to extract some interpersonal behavior data of participants directly from the simulation because the system uses that information to function. Another method to extract participant interaction behavior is to use social sensing technology, which will be outlined below.

Participant Interaction Behavior Extracted from IVET

There are some participant behaviors that can be measured directly by the IVE system that renders the virtual world. Interpersonal distance is a prime example for such automatic extraction of participant interaction behavior in a virtual encounter. This is because the IVE system constantly detects and monitors the location of the participant in order to render the virtual world in real time. Based on the location information of the participant and the virtual human, which is usually pre-defined by the programmer, interpersonal distance can be computed and registered during the entire social interaction. Interpersonal distance is an important social interaction behavior that can be indicative of approach-avoidance behavior or dominance ( Hall et al., 2005 ).

Another variable that can be recorded by IVET is the actual scene that is visualized by the participants, which might be an indicator of attentional strategies. This measure can be recorded by placing either visible or invisible markers in specific locations of the virtual scene. Given that participants can still move their eyes to focus on specific portions of the visual scene even without moving their heads, visualized scene can be a proxy of gaze direction but does not represent a precise measure.

Behavior Extraction Using Additional Equipment

In the previous section we discussed the use of visualized scene as a measure of attentional strategies within an IVE. The use of eye-tracking systems combined with the IVET allows more precise measures of attentional strategies. Wieser et al. (2010) involved a group of high and low socially anxious female participants in an IVE study in which they were approached by a virtual human. They measured participants’ eye movements and found that highly anxious participants avoided eye contact with male virtual humans.

Other measures, requiring additional equipment, include physiological data (e.g., heart rate, skin conductance response). Slater et al. (2006b) used an electrocardiogram to obtain measures of heart rate and recorded galvanic skin response while involving participants in a social interaction with five virtual humans. Results showed that the physiological measures changed significantly (i.e., faster heart rate and more pronounced skin conductance response) when virtual humans were present in the virtual world and when breaks in presence were elicited (i.e., short moments in time when participants’ subjective feeling of presence was interrupted by suddenly making the virtual world and the avatars vanish).

Given that this information about participant behavior is immediately available as the social interaction unfolds, these measures could be analyzed in real time and used to change or adapt subsequent behavior of a virtual human during an interaction. As an example, participant’s eye movements can be recorded and, for instance, the virtual human could then move to the location of the visual focus of the participant (or away from it, depending on the question under investigation). This data can also be complemented with information from social sensing to gather information about participant behavior.

Even though the devices outlined in this section are relatively non-invasive, the question remains whether their use interferes with participants’ feeling of presence. Indeed, one of the requirements for a virtual environment to be immersive is that information coming from the real world is shut out by a technological device (e.g., a head-mounted display) in order to enable individuals to focus on rendered information ( Slater and Wilbur, 1997 ) and feel presence. For instance, knowing that eye movements are recorded or feeling an electrode on the skin could remind participants that the virtual simulation is fictitious and as a consequence feeling of presence might be reduced. Future research might experimentally investigate whether indeed feelings of presence are influenced by the use of the external devices (e.g., eye-tracking, electrodes) we outline in this section. Sensing via ubiquitous computing (where the there is no direct input from the participant to the sensing device; the sensing is unobtrusive) is by definition non-invasive and might play a more important role for IVET in the future. There are still technological advancements needed in order to make such devices (e.g., a heart rate monitor watch) as accurate as more invasive standard recording methods (e.g., electrodes for heart rate measurement). One emerging field that will play an important role for the study of social interactions in IVET is social sensing.

Social Sensing of Participants in IVEs

Social sensing means the recording of interpersonal behavior from people engaged in social interactions via ubiquitous computing (i.e., no active computer input necessary, the environment is “smart” and registers people’s behavior) and computational models and algorithms for the automated extraction of social cues and for drawing social inferences ( Schmid Mast et al., 2015 ). Unobtrusive social sensing devices are cameras, microphones, and Kinect sensors, among others. Behavioral extraction algorithms are available for different verbal and non-verbal behaviors (e.g., nodding, gesturing, speech time, loudness of voice, interruptions). We predict that social sensing will play an important role in the future development of automatizing the communication between the participant and the virtual human and for training purposes. As an example, imagine that the computer can detect the quality of the speech a participant is delivering in front of a large audience via social sensing. If the quality of the speech is bad, the program will put the virtual humans in the audience gradually to sleep. If the quality of the speech improves, the virtual humans in the audience will start to pay more attention and signal interest by following the participants with their eyes and erecting their posture. This is the goal of Cicero ( Batrinca et al., 2013 ), a system that encompasses the automatic extraction of non-verbal behavior of a presenter through a Kinect device and gives a feedback (e.g., nodding, leaning forward) based on the evaluated (computed) performance (e.g., time spent gazing the audience, amount of pause fillers) through a virtual audience. Even though Cicero is not yet developed within IVET – only on a desktop virtual reality system - it is reasonable to assume that a similar system could be implemented in an IVE.

Another example in this direction comes from Zhang and Yap (2012) who studied automatic affect detection based on participants’ verbal (written) and non-verbal behavior during a virtual role-play. Affect detection in verbal information was performed through latent semantic analysis, which is an algorithm that automatically learns semantic information about words through their common use in natural language ( Landauer and Dumais, 1997 ). Emotional gesture recognition was based on a Kinect device, which extracted emotional content based on a skeleton tracking procedure. To illustrate, a participant placing his/her hand on the head was identified as a signal of confusion.

Virtual humans that show a human-like behavior (i.e., agents that are able to produce sentences and respond to interaction partners in natural conversations) are called embodied conversational agents. Some research has stressed the importance of implementing complex behavior on embodied conversational agents, like multimodal (e.g., facial expressions and body gestures) emotional expressions ( Pelachaud, 2009 ). Malatesta et al. (2009) developed a model to implement Scherer’s appraisal theory ( Scherer, 2001 ) for the elicitation of emotions in embodied conversational agents by using different intensities and timings. In the future, it could be possible to implement subtle facial mimicry responses on virtual humans and study their effect on participants’ behavior.

Conclusions and Future Challenges

As we illustrate in the present article, research on social interaction using IVET has established important results that were hard to achieve before its development. The here presented research is different from the one by Fox et al. (2009) in that we focus on social interactions with virtual humans in IVET whereas the Fox et al. (2009) paper is a broader review of the how IVET can and is used in the social sciences. Moreover, we are faced with a very fast developing research domain because of the frequent technical improvements and increased availability of relatively cheap virtual reality devices which makes an update since 2009 timely. In particular, in the last years more effort has been put into integrating IVET with other technologies, such as eye-tracking ( Wieser et al., 2010 ), movement extraction devices ( Zhang and Yap, 2012 ; Batrinca et al., 2013 ), and EEG ( Kober et al., 2012 ). Moreover, recent studies have started to address the issue of making the conversation between participants and virtual humans smoother ( Malatesta et al., 2009 ; Zhang and Yap, 2012 ). In addition, more studies investigated influences on participants’ behavior, physiological responses, and cognitions either by manipulating objects in the virtual world ( Latu et al., 2013 ; Qu et al., 2013 ), avatars’ behavior ( Llobera et al., 2010 ), or participants’ physical appearance in the virtual world ( Peck et al., 2013 ). Last but not least, new applications have been created for clinical use ( Park et al., 2011 ; Perez-Marcos et al., 2012 ) and for training participants, for instance when delivering a speech ( Batrinca et al., 2013 ).

Even though research using IVET in social interactions has achieved important results, we argue that researchers will need to face some challenges in the next years. There is evidence showing that participants’ psychological and physiological reactions in IVEs are similar to those in the real world ( Bailenson et al., 2003 ; Slater et al., 2006b ). However, people may still react somehow differently with virtual humans compared to real humans. To illustrate, while more simple or automatic behavior (e.g., avoiding a virtual human that is invading a participant’s personal space) might be comparable between real life and IVEs, more subtle or complex behavior (e.g., being kind or appreciative to an interaction partner) could differ. Different solutions might be adopted in order to address this issue. One possibility is to improve verbal and non-verbal behavioral realism of virtual humans. As discussed above, motion quality should be adapted and match pictorial quality of virtual humans in order to avoid participant’s perception of eeriness due to the uncanny valley effect ( Garau et al., 2003 ; Tinwell et al., 2011 ). Non-verbal behavior and motion of virtual humans could be rendered more realistically and more subtly by extracting it from real human motion. The latest blockbuster movies using computer-generated imagery (e.g., Avatar or The Lord of the Rings) might be taken as inspiration for this improvement. Computer-science advances are needed in order to implement very subtle non-verbal behavior (e.g., facial mimicry) on virtual humans and to improve the synchronization and the coordination between verbal and non-verbal behavior. For instance, lips movements should be adapted precisely to the phonic pattern of a verbal message.

In the same vein, while some effort has been made to improve communication between participants and virtual humans, it remains an important challenge for future research. Being able to have a free speech on any topic with a virtual human is the ultimate goal of this research area. Automatic language recognition, affect detection, social sensing, and speech production algorithms should be coordinated in order to achieve this goal.

Last but not least, perceived realism of virtual humans could be improved by implementing more high-level human qualities, such as personality traits, emotions, and theory of mind. Research shows that we form first impressions about strangers from verbal, non-verbal, and appearance cues ( Funder and Colvin, 1988 ). Thus, virtual humans’ verbal behavior, non-verbal behavior, and physical aspect could convey distinctive and congruent information about their personality. An example of this would be an extraverted virtual human with an open body posture who talks a lot and wears a casual dress. This would be an interesting feature not only in order to achieve interaction realism, but also because participant’s behavior in relation to different personality traits could be studied with high experimental control. Furthermore, simulating emotions in virtual humans would be important to make participants experience that their behavior or anything happening in the virtual world can have an impact, either positive or negative, on virtual humans. Finally, simulating in the virtual humans the ability to infer the internal states of others (the so-called Theory of Mind) would increase participants’ feeling that virtual humans can “understand” them. Taken together, the proposed features would improve perceived realism of the interaction and participants’ feeling of copresence.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgment

We thank Caroline Falconer for her useful comments and insights on an earlier version of the manuscript.

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Keywords : social interaction, immersive virtual environment, virtual humans, avatars, copresence

Citation: Bombari D, Schmid Mast M, Canadas E and Bachmann M (2015) Studying social interactions through immersive virtual environment technology: virtues, pitfalls, and future challenges. Front. Psychol. 6:869. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00869

Received: 28 January 2015; Accepted: 12 June 2015; Published: 24 June 2015.

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Copyright © 2015 Bombari, Schmid Mast, Canadas and Bachmann. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Dario Bombari, Department of Organizational Behavior, Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Lausanne, Quartier UNIL-Dorigny, Internef Building, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland, [email protected]

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Social Constructivism—Jerome Bruner

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This chapter considers the similarities between Constructivism and Social Constructivism, seen as two learning theories sharing a multitude of underlying assumptions. Major aspects, more specific to Social Constructivism, such as an emphasis on the collaborative nature of learning and the importance of a cultural and social context, are elaborated within the frame of an ‘education through science’ paradigm. Bruner’s ideas are introduced, especially emphasising the role of the teacher and instruction, plus different processes used by learners in undertaking problem-solving and socio-scientific decision-making. The need and constraints for curriculum change, initiated by Bruner, based on the notion that learning is a social process in which students construct new ideas, are discussed from different stakeholder viewpoints, building on students’ current knowledge and experiences. A theoretically justified case study, carried out under the framework of a research project, funded by the European Commission, is introduced. This focuses on a student relevant and motivational science teaching module, using the concept of contextualisation, re-contextualisation and de-contextualisation stages of the learning frame and encompassing a science for all philosophy associated with ‘education through science’. The uniqueness of the case study is the student’s socio-constructivist input into creating a scenario, which becomes the frame for initiating the overall teaching module, created by science educators. Also discussed is how a social constructivist approach covers different levels: learning and teaching. The overall conclusion leads to the recommendation that social constructivism, as an educational theory, needs greater acknowledgement in science education circles.

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Rannikmäe, M., Holbrook, J., Soobard, R. (2020). Social Constructivism—Jerome Bruner. In: Akpan, B., Kennedy, T.J. (eds) Science Education in Theory and Practice. Springer Texts in Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43620-9_18

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• Vygotsky’s Theory of Cognitive Development

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Sociocultural Theory 

The work of Lev Vygotsky (1934, 1978) has become the foundation of much research and theory in cognitive development over the past several decades, particularly what has become known as sociocultural theory.

Vygotsky’s theory comprises concepts such as culture-specific tools, private speech, and the zone of proximal development.

Vygotsky believed cognitive development is influenced by cultural and social factors. He emphasized the role of social interaction in the development of mental abilities e.g., speech and reasoning in children.

Vygotsky strongly believed that community plays a central role in the process of “making meaning.”

Cognitive development is a socially mediated process in which children acquire cultural values, beliefs, and problem-solving strategies through collaborative dialogues with more knowledgeable members of society.

The more knowledgeable other (MKO) is someone who has a higher level of ability or greater understanding than the learner regarding a particular task, process, or concept.

The MKO can be a teacher, parent, coach, or even a peer who provides guidance and modeling to enable the child to learn skills within their zone of proximal development (the gap between what a child can do independently and what they can achieve with guidance).

The interactions with more knowledgeable others significantly increase not only the quantity of information and the number of skills a child develops, but also affects the development of higher-order mental functions such as formal reasoning. Vygotsky argued that higher mental abilities could only develop through interaction with more advanced others.

According to Vygotsky, adults in society foster children’s cognitive development by engaging them in challenging and meaningful activities. Adults convey to children how their culture interprets and responds to the world.

They show the meaning they attach to objects, events, and experiences. They provide the child with what to think (the knowledge) and how to think (the processes, the tools to think with).

Vygotsky’s theory encourages collaborative and cooperative learning between children and teachers or peers. Scaffolding and reciprocal teaching are effective educational strategies based on Vygotsky’s ideas.

Scaffolding involves the teacher providing support structures to help students master skills just beyond their current level. In reciprocal teaching, teachers and students take turns leading discussions using strategies like summarizing and clarifying. Both scaffolding and reciprocal teaching emphasize the shared construction of knowledge, in line with Vygotsky’s views.

Vygotsky highlighted the importance of language in cognitive development. Inner speech is used for mental reasoning, and external speech is used to converse with others.

These operations occur separately. Indeed, before age two, a child employs words socially; they possess no internal language.

Once thought and language merge, however, the social language is internalized and assists the child with their reasoning. Thus, the social environment is ingrained within the child’s learning.

Effects of Culture

Vygotsky emphasized the role of the social environment in the child’s cognitive development.

Vygotsky claimed that infants are born with the basic abilities for intellectual development called “elementary mental functions” (Piaget focuses on motor reflexes and sensory abilities). These develop throughout the first two years of life due to direct environmental contact.

Elementary mental functions include –

o Attention o Sensation o Perception o Memory

Eventually, through interaction within the sociocultural environment, these are developed into more sophisticated and effective mental processes, which Vygotsky refers to as “higher mental functions.”

Tools of intellectual adaptation

Each culture provides its children with tools of intellectual adaptation that allow them to use basic mental functions more effectively/adaptively.

Tools of intellectual adaptation is Vygotsky’s term for methods of thinking and problem-solving strategies that children internalize through social interactions with the more knowledgeable members of society.

For example, memory in young children is limited by biological factors. However, culture determines the type of memory strategy we develop.

For example, in Western culture, children learn note-taking to aid memory, but in pre-literate societies, other strategies must be developed, such as tying knots in a string to remember, carrying pebbles, or repeating the names of ancestors until large numbers can be repeated.

Vygotsky, therefore, sees cognitive functions, even those carried out alone, as affected by the beliefs, values, and tools of intellectual adaptation of the culture in which a person develops and, therefore, socio-culturally determined.

Therefore, intellectual adaptation tools vary from culture to culture – as in the memory example.

Social Influences on Cognitive Development

Like Piaget, Vygotsky believes that young children are curious and actively involved in their own learning and discovering and developing new understandings/schema .

However, Vygotsky emphasized social contributions to the development process, whereas Piaget emphasized self-initiated discovery.

According to Vygotsky (1978), much important learning by the child occurs through social interaction with a skillful tutor. The tutor may model behaviors and/or provide verbal instructions for the child.

Vygotsky refers to this as cooperative or collaborative dialogue. The child seeks to understand the actions or instructions provided by the tutor (often the parent or teacher) and then internalizes the information, using it to guide or regulate their performance.

Shaffer (1996) gives the example of a young girl given her first jigsaw. Alone, she performs poorly in attempting to solve the puzzle. The father then sits with her and describes or demonstrates some basic strategies, such as finding all the corner/edge pieces, and provides a couple of pieces for the child to put together herself, and offers encouragement when she does so.

As the child becomes more competent, the father allows the child to work more independently. According to Vygotsky, this social interaction involving cooperative or collaborative dialogue promotes cognitive development.

To understand Vygotsky’s theories on cognitive development, one must understand two of the main principles of Vygotsky’s work: the More Knowledgeable Other (MKO) and the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD).

More Knowledgeable Other

The more knowledgeable other (MKO) is somewhat self-explanatory; it refers to someone who has a better understanding or a higher ability level than the learner, concerning a particular task, process, or concept.

Although the implication is that the MKO is a teacher or an older adult, this is not necessarily the case. Often, a child’s peers or an adult’s children may be the individuals with more knowledge or experience.

For example, who is more likely to know more about the newest teenage music groups, how to win at the most recent PlayStation game, or how to correctly perform the newest dance craze – a child or their parents?

In fact, the MKO need not be a person at all. To support employees in their learning process, some companies are now using electronic performance support systems.

Electronic tutors have also been used in educational settings to facilitate and guide students through learning. The key to MKOs is that they must have (or be programmed with) more knowledge about the topic being learned than the learner does.

Zone of Proximal Development

The concept of the more knowledgeable other relates to the second important principle of Vygotsky’s work, the zone of proximal development .

This important concept relates to the difference between what a child can achieve independently and what a child can achieve with guidance and encouragement from a skilled partner.

Vygotsky consequently focuses much more closely on social interaction as an aid to learning, arguing that, left alone, children will develop – but not to their full potential.

He refers to the gap between actual and potential learning as the zone of proximal development (ZPD) – and argues that it is only through collaboration with adults and other learners that this gap can be bridged.

The zone of proximal development is the gap between the level of actual development, what the child can do on his own, and the level of potential development, what a child can do with the assistance of more advanced and competent individuals.

Social interaction, therefore, supports the child’s cognitive development in the ZPD, leading to a higher level of reasoning. It is generally believed that social dialogues have two important features.

The first is intersubjectivity, where two individuals who might have different understandings of a task, arrive at a shared understanding by adjusting to the perspective of the other.

The second feature is referred to as scaffolding. Adults may begin with direct instruction, but as children’s mastery of a task increases, so the adult tends to withdraw their own contributions in recognition of the child’s increasing success.

For example, the child could not solve the jigsaw puzzle (in the example above) by itself and would have taken a long time to do so (if at all), but was able to solve it following interaction with the father, and has developed competence at this skill that will be applied to future jigsaws.

ZPD is the zone where instruction is the most beneficial, as it is when the task is just beyond the individual’s capabilities. To learn, we must be presented with tasks just out of our ability range. Challenging tasks promote maximum cognitive growth.

As a result of shared dialogues with more knowledgeable others, who provide hints, instructions, and encouragement, the child can internalize the ‘how to do it’ part of the task as part of their inner or private speech. The child can then use this on later occasions when they tackle a similar task on their own.

Vygotsky (1978) sees the Zone of Proximal Development as the area where the most sensitive instruction or guidance should be given – allowing the child to develop skills they will then use on their own – developing higher mental functions.

Vygotsky also views peer interaction as an effective way of developing skills and strategies.  He suggests that teachers use cooperative learning exercises where less competent children develop with help from more skillful peers – within the zone of proximal development.

Evidence for Vygotsky and the ZPD

Freund (1990) conducted a study in which children had to decide which items of furniture should be placed in particular areas of a doll’s house.

Some children were allowed to play with their mother in a similar situation before they attempted it alone (zone of proximal development) while others were allowed to work on this by themselves (Piaget’s discovery learning).

Freund found that those who had previously worked with their mother (ZPD) showed the greatest improvement compared with their first attempt at the task.

The conclusion is that guided learning within the ZPD led to greater understanding/performance than working alone (discovery learning).

Vygotsky and Language

Vygotsky believed that language develops from social interactions for communication purposes. Vygotsky viewed language as man’s greatest tool for communicating with the outside world.

According to Vygotsky (1962), language plays two critical roles in cognitive development:

• It is the main means by which adults transmit information to children.
• Language itself becomes a very powerful tool for intellectual adaptation.

Vygotsky (1987) differentiates between three forms of language:

• Social speech, which is external communication used to talk to others (typical from the age of two);
• Private speech (typical from the age of three) which is directed to the self and serves an intellectual function;
• Private speech goes underground , diminishing in audibility as it takes on a self-regulating function and is transformed into silent inner speech (typical from the age of seven).

For Vygotsky, thought and language are initially separate systems from the beginning of life, merging at around three years of age.

At this point, speech and thought become interdependent: thought becomes verbal, and speech becomes representational.

As children develop mental representation, particularly the skill of language, they start to communicate with themselves in much the same way as they would communicate with others.

When this happens, children’s monologues are internalized to become inner speech. The internalization of language is important as it drives cognitive development.

“Inner speech is not the interiour aspect of external speech – it is a function in itself. It still remains speech, i.e., thought connected with words. But while in external speech thought is embodied in words, in inner speech words dies as they bring forth thought. Inner speech is to a large extent thinking in pure meanings.” (Vygotsky, 1962: p. 149)

Private Speech

Vygotsky (1987) was the first psychologist to document the importance of private speech.

He considered private speech as the transition point between social and inner speech, the moment in development where language and thought unite to constitute verbal thinking.

Thus, in Vygotsky’s view, private speech was the earliest manifestation of inner speech. Indeed, private speech is more similar (in form and function) to inner speech than social speech.

Private speech is “typically defined, in contrast to social speech, as speech addressed to the self (not to others) for the purpose of self-regulation (rather than communication).” (Diaz, 1992, p.62)

Private speech is overt, audible, and observable, often seen in children who talk to themselves while problem-solving.

Conversely, inner speech is covert or hidden because it happens internally. It is the silent, internal dialogue that adults often engage in while thinking or problem-solving.

In contrast to Piaget’s (1959) notion of private speech representing a developmental dead-end, Vygotsky (1934, 1987) viewed private speech as:

“A revolution in development which is triggered when preverbal thought and preintellectual language come together to create fundamentally new forms of mental functioning.” (Fernyhough & Fradley, 2005: p. 1)

In addition to disagreeing on the functional significance of private speech, Vygotsky and Piaget also offered opposing views on the developmental course of private speech and the environmental circumstances in which it occurs most often (Berk & Garvin, 1984).

Through private speech, children collaborate with themselves, in the same way a more knowledgeable other (e.g., adults) collaborate with them to achieve a given function.

Vygotsky sees “private speech” as a means for children to plan activities and strategies, aiding their development. Private speech is the use of language for self-regulation of behavior.

Therefore, language accelerates thinking/understanding ( Jerome Bruner also views language in this way). Vygotsky believed that children who engage in large amounts of private speech are more socially competent than children who do not use it extensively.

Vygotsky (1987) notes that private speech does not merely accompany a child’s activity but acts as a tool the developing child uses to facilitate cognitive processes, such as overcoming task obstacles, and enhancing imagination, thinking, and conscious awareness.

Children use private speech most often during intermediate difficulty tasks because they attempt to self-regulate by verbally planning and organizing their thoughts (Winsler et al., 2007).

The frequency and content of private speech correlate with behavior or performance. For example, private speech appears functionally related to cognitive performance: It appears at times of difficulty with a task.

For example, tasks related to executive function (Fernyhough & Fradley, 2005), problem-solving tasks (Behrend et al., 1992), and schoolwork in both language (Berk & Landau, 1993), and mathematics (Ostad & Sorensen, 2007).

Berk (1986) provided empirical support for the notion of private speech. She found that most private speech exhibited by children serves to describe or guide the child’s actions.

Berk also discovered that children engaged in private speech more often when working alone on challenging tasks and when their teacher was not immediately available to help them.

Furthermore, Berk also found that private speech develops similarly in all children regardless of cultural background.

There is also evidence (Behrend et al., 1992) that those children who displayed the characteristic whispering and lip movements associated with private speech when faced with a difficult task were generally more attentive and successful than their ‘quieter’ classmates.

Vygotsky (1987) proposed that private speech is a product of an individual’s social environment. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that there exist high positive correlations between rates of social interaction and private speech in children.

Children raised in cognitively and linguistically stimulating environments (situations more frequently observed in higher socioeconomic status families) start using and internalizing private speech faster than children from less privileged backgrounds.

Indeed, children raised in environments characterized by low verbal and social exchanges exhibit delays in private speech development.

Children’s use of private speech diminishes as they grow older and follows a curvilinear trend. This is due to changes in ontogenetic development whereby children can internalize language (through inner speech) to self-regulate their behavior (Vygotsky, 1987).

For example, research has shown that children’s private speech usually peaks at 3–4 years of age, decreases at 6–7, and gradually fades out to be mostly internalized by age 10 (Diaz, 1992).

Vygotsky proposed that private speech diminishes and disappears with age not because it becomes socialized, as Piaget suggested, but because it goes underground to constitute inner speech or verbal thought” (Frauenglass & Diaz, 1985).

Educational Implications

Vygotsky’s approach to child development is a form of social constructivism , based on the idea that cognitive functions are the products of social interactions.

Social constructivism posits that knowledge is constructed and learning occurs through social interactions within a cultural and historical context.

Vygotsky emphasized the collaborative nature of learning by constructing knowledge through social negotiation. He rejected the assumption made by Piaget that it was possible to separate learning from its social context.

Vygotsky believed everything is learned on two levels. First, through interaction with others, then integrated into the individual’s mental structure.

Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals. (Vygotsky, 1978, p.57)

Teaching styles grounded in constructivism represent a deliberate shift from traditional, didactic, memory-oriented transmission models (Cannella & Reiff, 1994) to a more student-centered approach.

Traditionally, schools have failed to foster environments where students actively participate in their own and their peers’ education. Vygotsky’s theory, however, calls for both the teacher and students to assume non-traditional roles as they engage in collaborative learning.

Rather than having a teacher impose their understanding onto students for future recitation, the teacher should co-create meaning with students in a manner that allows learners to take ownership (Hausfather, 1996).

For instance, a student and teacher might start a task with varying levels of expertise and understanding. As they adapt to each other’s perspective, the teacher must articulate their insights in a way that the student can comprehend, leading the student to a fuller understanding of the task or concept.

The student can then internalize the task’s operational aspect (“how to do it”) into their inner speech or private dialogue. Vygotsky referred to this reciprocal understanding and adjustment process as intersubjectivity.”

Because Vygotsky asserts that cognitive change occurs within the zone of proximal development, instruction would be designed to reach a developmental level just above the student’s current developmental level.

Vygotsky proclaims, “learning which is oriented toward developmental levels that have already been reached is ineffective from the viewpoint of the child’s overall development. It does not aim for a new stage of the developmental process but rather lags behind this process” (Vygotsky, 1978).

Appropriation is necessary for cognitive development within the zone of proximal development. Individuals participating in peer collaboration or guided teacher instruction must share the same focus to access the zone of proximal development.

“Joint attention and shared problem solving is needed to create a process of cognitive, social, and emotional interchange” (Hausfather,1996).

Furthermore, it is essential that the partners be on different developmental levels and the higher-level partner be aware of the lower’s level. If this does not occur or one partner dominates, the interaction is less successful (Driscoll, 1994; Hausfather, 1996).

Vygotsky’s theories also feed into the current interest in collaborative learning, suggesting that group members should have different levels of ability so more advanced peers can help less advanced members operate within their ZPD.

Scaffolding and reciprocal teaching are effective strategies to access the zone of proximal development.

Reciprocal Teaching

A contemporary educational application of Vygotsky’s theory is “reciprocal teaching,” used to improve students” ability to learn from text.

In this method, teachers and students collaborate in learning and practicing four key skills: summarizing, questioning, clarifying, and predicting. The teacher’s role in the process is reduced over time.

Reciprocal teaching allows for the creation of a dialogue between students and teachers. This two-way communication becomes an instructional strategy by encouraging students to go beyond answering questions and engage in the discourse (Driscoll, 1994; Hausfather, 1996).

A study conducted by Brown and Palincsar (1989) demonstrated the Vygotskian approach with reciprocal teaching methods in their successful program to teach reading strategies.

The teacher and students alternated turns leading small group discussions on a reading. After modeling four reading strategies, students began to assume the teaching role.

The results showed significant gains over other instructional strategies (Driscoll, 1994; Hausfather,1996).

Cognitively Guided Instruction is another strategy to implement Vygotsky’s theory. This strategy involves the teacher and students exploring math problems and then sharing their problem-solving strategies in an open dialogue (Hausfather,1996).

Based on Vygotsky’s theory, the physical classroom would provide clustered desks or tables and workspace for peer instruction, collaboration, and small-group instruction. Learning becomes a reciprocal experience for the students and teacher.

Like the environment, the instructional design of the material to be learned would be structured to promote and encourage student interaction and collaboration. Thus the classroom becomes a community of learning.

Scaffolding

Also, Vygotsky’s theory of cognitive development on learners is relevant to instructional concepts such as “scaffolding” and “apprenticeship,” in which a teacher or more advanced peer helps to structure or arrange a task so that a novice can work on it successfully.

A teacher’s role is to identify each individual’s current level of development and provide them with opportunities to cross their ZPD.

A crucial element in this process is the use of what later became known as scaffolding; the way in which the teacher provides students with frameworks and experiences which encourage them to extend their existing schemata and incorporate new skills, competencies, and understandings.

Scaffolding describes the conditions that support the child’s learning, to move from what they already know to new knowledge and abilities.

Scaffolding requires the teacher to allow students to extend their current skills and knowledge.

During scaffolding, the support offered by an adult (or more knowledgeable other) gradually decreases as the child becomes more skilled in the task.

As the adult withdraws their help, the child assumes more of the strategic planning and eventually gains competence to master similar problems without a teacher’s aid or a more knowledgeable peer.

It is important to note that this is more than simply instruction; learning experiences must be presented in such a way as to actively challenge existing mental structures and provide frameworks for learning.

Five ways in which an adult can “scaffold” a child’s learning:

• Engaging the child’s interest
• Maintaining the child’s interest in the task e.g., avoiding distraction and providing clear instructions on how to start the task.
• Keeping the child’s frustration under control e.g., by supportive interactions, adapting instructions according to where the child is struggling.
• Emphasizing the important features of the task
• Demonstrating the task: showing the child how to do the task in simple, clear steps.

As the child progresses through the ZPD, the necessary scaffolding level declines from 5 to 1.

The teacher must engage students’ interests, simplify tasks to be manageable, and motivate students to pursue the instructional goal.

In addition, the teacher must look for discrepancies between students” efforts and the solution, control for frustration and risk, and model an idealized version of the act (Hausfather, 1996).

Challenges to Traditional Teaching Methods

Vygotsky’s social development theory challenges traditional teaching methods. Historically, schools have been organized around recitation teaching.

The teacher disseminates knowledge to be memorized by the students, who in turn recite the information to the teacher (Hausfather,1996).

However, the studies described above offer empirical evidence that learning based on the social development theory facilitates cognitive development over other instructional strategies.

The structure of our schools does not reflect the rapid changes our society is experiencing. The introduction and integration of computer technology in society has tremendously increased the opportunities for social interaction.

Therefore, the social context for learning is transforming as well. Whereas collaboration and peer instruction were once only possible in shared physical space, learning relationships can now be formed from distances through cyberspace.

Computer technology is a cultural tool that students can use to meditate and internalize their learning. Recent research suggests changing the learning contexts with technology is a powerful learning activity (Crawford, 1996).

If schools continue to resist structural change, students will be ill-prepared for the world they will live.

Critical Evaluation

Vygotsky’s work has not received the same level of intense scrutiny that Piaget’s has, partly due to the time-consuming process of translating Vygotsky’s work from Russian.

Also, Vygotsky’s sociocultural perspective does not provide as many specific hypotheses to test as Piaget’s theory, making refutation difficult, if not impossible.

Perhaps the main criticism of Vygotsky’s work concerns the assumption that it is relevant to all cultures. Rogoff (1990) dismisses the idea that Vygotsky’s ideas are culturally universal and instead states that scaffolding- heavily dependent on verbal instruction – may not be equally useful in all cultures for all types of learning.

Indeed, in some instances, observation and practice may be more effective ways of learning certain skills.

There is much emphasis on social interaction and culture, but many other aspects of development are neglected, such as the importance of emotional factors, e.g., the joys of success and the disappointments and frustration of failure act as motivation for learning.

Vygotsky overemphasized socio-cultural factors at the expense of biological influences on cognitive development. This theory cannot explain why cross-cultural studies show that the stages of development (except the formal operational stage ) occur in the same order in all cultures suggesting that cognitive development is a product of a biological process of maturation.

Vygotky’s theory has been applied successfully to education. Scaffolding has been shown to be an effective way of teaching (Freund, 1990), and based on this theory, teachers are trained to guide children from what they can do to the next step in their learning through careful scaffolding.

Collaborative work is also used in the classroom, mixing children of different levels of ability to make use of reciprocal / peer teaching.

Vygotsky vs. Piaget

Unlike Piaget’s notion that children’s cognitive development must necessarily precede their learning, Vygotsky argued, “learning is a necessary and universal aspect of the process of developing culturally organized, specifically human psychological function” (1978, p. 90).  In other words, social learning precedes (i.e., come before) development.

Vygotsky’s theory differs from that of Piaget in several important ways:

Vygotsky places more emphasis on culture affecting cognitive development.

Unlike Piaget, who emphasized universal cognitive change (i.e., all children would go through the same sequence of cognitive development regardless of their cultural experiences), Vygotsky leads us to expect variable development depending on cultural diversity. 

This contradicts Piaget’s view of universal stages of development (Vygotsky does not refer to stages like Piaget does).

Hence, Vygotsky assumes cognitive development varies across cultures, whereas Piaget states cognitive development is mostly universal across cultures.

Vygotsky places considerably more emphasis on social factors contributing to cognitive development.

• Vygotsky states the importance of cultural and social context for learning. Cognitive development stems from social interactions from guided learning within the zone of proximal development as children and their partners co-construct knowledge. In contrast, Piaget maintains that cognitive development stems largely from independent explorations in which children construct knowledge.
• For Vygotsky, the environment in which children grow up will influence how they think and what they think about. The importance of scaffolding and language may differ for all cultures. Rogoff (1990) emphasizes the importance of observation and practice in pre-industrial societies (e.g., learning to use a canoe among Micronesian Islanders).

Vygotsky places more (and different) emphasis on the role of language in cognitive development.

According to Piaget , language depends on thought for its development (i.e., thought comes before language). For Vygotsky, thought and language are initially separate systems from the beginning of life, merging at around three years of age, producing verbal thought (inner speech).

In Piaget’s theory, egocentric (or private) speech gradually disappears as children develop truly social speech, in which they monitor and adapt what they say to others.

Vygotsky disagreed with this view, arguing that as language helps children to think about and control their behavior, it is an important foundation for complex cognitive skills.

As children age, this self-directed speech becomes silent (or private) speech, referring to the inner dialogues we have with ourselves as we plan and carry out activities.

For Vygotsky, cognitive development results from an internalization of language.

According to Vygotsky, adults are an important source of cognitive development.

Adults transmit their culture’s tools of intellectual adaptation that children internalize.

In contrast, Piaget emphasizes the importance of peers, as peer interaction promotes social perspective-taking.

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Further Reading

What is vygotsky’s theory.

Vygotsky believed that cognitive development was founded on social interaction. According to Vygotsky, much of what children acquire in their understanding of the world is the product of collaboration.

How is Vygotsky’s theory applied in teaching and learning?

Vygotsky’s theory has profound implications for classroom learning. Teachers guide, support, and encourage children, yet also help them to develop problem-solving strategies that can be generalized to other situations.

Children learn best not when they are isolated, but when they interact with others, particularly more knowledgeable others who can provide the guidance and encouragement to master new skills.

What was Vygotsky’s best know concept?

Lev Vygotsky was a seminal Russian psychologist best known for his sociocultural theory. He constructed the idea of a zone of proximal development ,  which are those tasks which are too difficult for a child to solve alone but s/he can accomplish with the help of adults or more skilled peers.

Vygotsky has developed a sociocultural approach to cognitive development. He developed his theories at around the same time as  Jean Piaget  was starting to develop his ideas (1920’s and 30″s), but he died at the age of 38, and so his theories are incomplete – although some of his writings are still being translated from Russian.

Like Piaget, Vygotsky could be described as a  constructivist , in that he was interested in knowledge acquisition as a cumulative event – with new experiences and understandings incorporated into existing cognitive frameworks.

However, while Piaget’s theory is structural (arguing that physiological stages govern development), Vygotsky denies the existence of any guiding framework independent of culture and context.

No single principle (such as Piaget’s equilibration) can account for development. Individual development cannot be understood without reference to the social and cultural context within which it is embedded. Higher mental processes in the individual have their origin in social processes.

What is Vygotsky’s Social Development Theory?

Vygotsky’s Social Development Theory is often referred to as the Sociocultural Theory.

Vygotsky’s Social Development Theory posits that social interaction is fundamental to cognitive development. Vygotsky emphasized the influence of cultural and social contexts on learning, claiming that knowledge is constructed through social collaboration.

His most known concept, the Zone of Proximal Development, refers to the difference between what a learner can do independently and what they can achieve with guidance.