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Social Appearance of Virtual Agent and Temporal Contingency Effect

Published: 21 October 2015 Publication History

Abstract

In our previous study, we developed Pedagogical Agent with Gaze Interaction (PAGI), an anthropomorphic animated pedagogical agent that engages in gaze interaction with students. Using PAGI, we revealed that temporal contingency from virtual agents facilitate learning (temporal contingency effect), and proposed two hypotheses that may explain the result; 1) temporal contingency reduces extraneous cognitive load related to visual search, 2) temporal contingency prime social stance in learners which enhances learning. To assess more deeply into this matter, we tested two critical features of the agent, saliency and socialness. Two arrow shaped agents, of which differed in saliency, were employed. Apart from the appearance of the agents, the experimental design was identical to the previous study. University students learned words of a foreign language, with temporally contingent agent or recorded version of the agent, which played pre-recorded sessions from the contingent agents. From the result we gained evidence supporting the second hypothesis. Non-social agents did not trigger temporal contingency effect.

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    HAI '15: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction
    October 2015
    254 pages
    ISBN:9781450335270
    DOI:10.1145/2814940
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 21 October 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. educational technology
    2. embodied artificial agent
    3. gaze interaction
    4. pedagogical agent
    5. temporal contingency

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    HAI 2015: The Third International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction
    October 21 - 24, 2015
    Kyungpook, Daegu, Republic of Korea

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