Towards a Mentor-Mentee Multimodal Communication Framework: An Observational Study on Communication Dynamics During Mentorship Medical Education

This article examines the situated organization of mentor-mentee interaction during teaching ultrasound-guided regional anesthesia in a clinical setting. It aims to both characterize how instructional communication unfolds under clinical constraints and inform the design of future immersive collaborative training systems. Focusing on how mentors deploy various communicative modalities to shape technical learning in real time, the study draws on observations of nine mentors, three mentees, twenty-two procedures, and 766 instances of instructional feedback during practical sessions. The analysis reveals a predominance of verbal feedback, particularly in guiding eye-hand coordination and instrument manipulation. It also identifies moments where verbal communication alone proves insufficient, and mentors resort to multimodal strategies, combining gestures, touch, and bodily repositioning to direct attention, clarify expectations, and support moment-to-moment adjustments. These modality combinations are shown to be task-dependent and strategically orchestrated rather than incidental. By articulating how mentors adapt their instructional practices to task demands, learner needs, and situational constraints, the study proposes an interactional framework for understanding technical skill transmission as a temporally sensitive, embodied, and collaborative accomplishment. These findings extend existing models of mentoring communication and provide concrete design insights for virtual reality and augmented training systems that aim to support situated, mentor-guided learning.