ABSTRACT Behavioral accommodation, the adjustment of one's own behavior to match that of other people, is prevalent in human communication, but people differ in the extent to which they accommodate each other. This paper presents a laboratory study examining how cultural background affects behavioral accommodation in awareness information gathering behaviors. Results suggested that members of collectivistic cultures (e.g., China) adjusted their behaviors to match those of their partners, when they were working with someone from other culture, whereas members of individualistic cultures (e.g.: the United States) did not accommodate when in the same situation. Our results suggest that accommodation exists even in online collaborations where no linguistic elements are involved, but this existence is affected by one's cultural background.

Abstract-Sharing awareness information to help remote people establish real-time communication has been a research area for the past couple decades. Much of the work so far has focused on sharing awareness for communication availability in the work setting. Yet several recent trends suggest the need to reconsider the contexts and assumptions around awareness research. Increasing deployment of communication technology in homes and the blurring of home and work boundaries means that more communication interactions involve the home. The popularity of mobile smartphones adds the mobile context and the sensor capabilities integrated into mobile devices. Given the broadened scope of where and how communication occurs and the importance of being able to smoothly negotiate starting and ending conversations, there is an opportunity to reconsider awareness research in today's environment. We identify current challenges and opportunities in awareness research from perspectives beyond focusing just on the workplace to include technologies and use practices in the home and mobile contexts. Keywords-awareness; availability; presence; awareness; computer-mediated communication; workplace; home; mobile I. RECONSIDERING AWARENESS INFORMATION For the past couple decades, research on presence and awareness has explored how to help people time and negotiate their attempts to establish communication over distance. Yet during the course of those years, much of the technology and use practice landscape has changed in ways that have a direct impact on how people use and interpret awareness information. The increased use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in the home adds a distinctly different context in which to establish communication. The growing popularity of mobile smartphones not only adds a mobile context for establishing communication, but also offers new sensing capabilities that increases the amount of awareness information available. In light of these recent developments, we identify several important dimensions for reconsidering awareness information to support real-time communication. A. Awareness in the Workplace Context Much of the prior awareness research has focused on workbased communication, typically in the office setting of a work environment. For example, the early Media Space work Hudson et al. [4] conducted an Experience Sampling Method study to identify what are the strongest indicators for availability in the workplace. They concluded that the presence of speech (i.e., that a person was already engaged in conversation with someone else) was strongly correlated with being unavailable for new interaction. Sophisticated models for predicting presence and availability based on on-line calendar and computer activity information that is readily available have also been developed in the work context [5], [6]. More recently, Dugan et al. Sharing awareness in the workplace can leverage many resources and conditions that are typical of a work environment. The traditionally higher performance computing