Perceiving and Responding to Others: Human-Human and Human- Computer Social Interaction in Collaborative Virtual Environments

In this paper, we propose a framework for understanding technology-mediated social interaction that attempts to synthesize theory and research from the fields of social psychology, communications, sociology, and computer science. Although this perspective has developed primarily to describe the social dynamics of interactions occurring within collaborative virtual environments (CVEs), we believe this general framework will be of use to those who study other types of mediated and non-mediated interactions as well.