# Investigation of Interactive Strategies Used in Undertaking Collaborative Tasks
## 5 General Discussion and Application  
We conducted three experiments to compare the effects of three interactive strategies on the task performance. Table 1 summarizes the four parameters used to measure the task performance under each interactive strategy. The values of these parameters were averaged from their counterparts in the three experiments. Generally, Tele-Operation allowed the novice to complete the task in the shortest length of time and with the smallest amount of errors in performing the task, compared to both Tele-Assistance3 and Tele-Assistance7. The novice used much fewer operations and carried more workload under Tele-Assistance7 than under Tele-Operation. Tele-Assistance3 exhibited the characteristics between Tele-Operation and Tele-Assistance7 for these parameters, except the number of operations were comparable to that of Tele-Assitance7. These observations suggest that interactive strategies affect the task performance of the novice in a collaborative task. This is associated with the novice's level of autonomy in performing the task: the higher level of autonomy reflects a higher level of responsibility, resulting in a higher level of perceived workload, completion time, and error in performing the task. Nevertheless, the higher level of responsibility yields a lower number of operations for efficiency. To summarize, these results suggest that when considering interaction strategies used to facilitate collaboration that one should consider the different parameters that can affect the performance of the collaborative task. The above evaluation of the effect of different interaction strategies on these parameters will allow one to select an optimal interaction strategy to accomplish a collaborative task with the best performance. If a short completion time of the task and/or a little amount of errors are the key parameters, Tele-Operation is a suitable interactive strategy. For example, this strategy can be used in helping children with dysgraphia to develop handwriting skills. By utilizing Tele-Operation, a teacher (expert) can guide a student with dysgraphia (novice) step-by-step to undertake various tracing tasks in order to help the student to develop fine motor movements required for handwriting. In contrast, Tele-Assistance7 shows the practicality of tele-assistance. Although Tele-Assistance7 requires more time and produces larger errors in completing the collaborative task than Tele-Operation, the novice actually deploys fewer operations in order to perform the task more efficiently. Thus, Tele-Assistance7 can relieve some burden in the communication between the expert and the novice. This strategy would be suitable for performing a maintenance task involving both a remote expert and a field worker. The reduced number of operations would result in the decrease of maintenance cost, if expensive equipment is required in such maintenance. Tele-Assistance3 could be used for a collaborative task, in which the number of operations is the key parameter and other parameters need to be balanced. This strategy could be used to train surgical trainees for proper techniques, where a skilled surgeon could give instructions to a trainee to perform a surgical task, and the trainee would devise the actions of the task. By observing how the trainee undertakes the task, the surgeon could intervene (and veto) the trainee's actions in order to directly guide the trainee's actions. In short, our assessment of three interactive strategies offers an analytical base for tailoring these strategies to certain collaborative tasks in the future. This project was under the support of the research grant (STFGP364847-08) by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the National Nature Science Foundations of China (No. 61403320).