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An Affective Virtual Agent Providing Embodied Feedback in the Paired Associate Task: System Design and Evaluation

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Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 8108))

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Abstract

An affective, virtual agent is presented that acts as a teacher in the classical paired associate task. It is explained, why and how the virtual agent framework MARC was combined with the cognitive architecture ACT-R, the affect simulation architecture WASABI, and the voice-synthesis module OpenMARY. The agent’s affective feedback capabilities are evaluated through an empirical study, in which participants had to solve association tasks. We expected that (1) the presentation of the task by a (neutral) virtual agent would change a learner’s performance and that (2) the additional simulation and expression of emotions would impact a learner’s performance as well. Finally, we discuss reasons for the lack of statistically significant differences as well as planned future application scenarios of our affective agent framework.

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Becker-Asano, C., Stahl, P., Ragni, M., Courgeon, M., Martin, JC., Nebel, B. (2013). An Affective Virtual Agent Providing Embodied Feedback in the Paired Associate Task: System Design and Evaluation. In: Aylett, R., Krenn, B., Pelachaud, C., Shimodaira, H. (eds) Intelligent Virtual Agents. IVA 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8108. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40415-3_36

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40415-3_36

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-40414-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-40415-3

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