Co-Regulation and Multimodal Synchrony in Pair Programming

Gaze, emotional, and physiological synchronies are predictive of collaborative performance and quality.However, these synchronies are studied mostly in unimodal settings.We present a pair programming study to understand the relationship between multimodal synchrony and co-regulation processes.We collected eye-tracking, heart rate variability, electrodermal activity, facial expressions, dialogues from 40 pairs while they were collaboratively debugging a given program.We then coded their dialogues to examine coregulation-based differences between the high and low performing pairs.Next, we computed gaze, facial expressions, stress and engagement based synchronies.We then examined the relationships between different synchronies and co-regulation dialogues.Our results show that argumentation and negotiation are negatively related to performance while cooperation, monitoring, goal-setting and co-regulation have a positive relationship with performance.We also find that argumentation and negotiation have lower joint attention and lower joint mental effort with high average mental effort and lower joint stress with high average stress.