Dyadic Interactions

The first step in my research is to understand the topic that I will be studying completely. I will eventually come up with a series of experiments to investigate the issues that I have chosen to address. I first have to have a clear understanding of what is already understood about my topic and to do this I have broken my project down in to understanding:
1) Dyadic interactions
2) Learning

This post will explore dyadic interactions.
A dyadic interaction is, according to the Oxford University Press, an "interaction between two people (a dyad); interpersonal interaction."
Work by Neomy Storch titled "Relationships formed in dyadic interactions and opportunity for learning" investigates how the relationships between pairs can help to promote learning in the context of a university second language classroom (ESL) setting, Storch claims that there are different types of relationships formed, those of a collaborative nature and those that take a dominant/dominant form. She investigates how the type of relationship then translates to individual learning.
The work by Neomy Storch is supported by a large body of work that looks at the importance of dyadic interactions within a classroom, especially one  with the purpose of teaching a second language. The interactions help to catalyze the learning process and allow the student to feel more comfortable with the material, which in turn allows a better understanding of the material.
All of this work investigates dyadic interactions, and how we can use this information to better understand social interactions.
The work that I would like to accomplish through my current project will look at dyadic interactions as a tool for not only studying social interactions and the transfer of knowledge, but also the transfer of skills.
My previous work, "The influence of avatar (self and character) animations on distance estimation, object interaction and locomotion in immersive virtual environments" addressed the question of how adding other human beings to a Virtual Environment (VE) (whether it was in the form of a previously recorded animation or a self-representation of the user within the environment) affected task performance on three simple tasks. We found that adding either form of human character to the scene did help to improve task performance, and we conclude that the presence of other characters within the scene provides users with helpful cues such as familiar size cues and biological movement cues that are typically absent from VEs. It will be interesting to extend this work, then, and look at the influence a character into the VE that our users can interact with, as opposed to passively watching a recorded character perform a task.

The above is a very brief overview of the motivation for my current project. Next week I will discuss different methods in which humans learn, so we can understand the reasons behind why dyadic interactions seem to be such a powerful tool for enabling the learning process.

References:

Neomy Storch, "Relationships formed in dyadic interaction

and opportunity for learning",International Journal of Educational

Research, Volume 37, Issues 3-4, 2002, Pages 305-322, ISSN 0883-0355,

10.1016/S0883-0355(03)00007-7.