Abstract
As a virtual human is provided with more human-like characteristics, will it elicit stronger social responses from people? Two experiments were conducted to address these questions. The first experiment investigated whether virtual humans can evoke a social facilitation response and how strong that response is when people are given different cognitive tasks that vary in difficulty. The second experiment investigated whether people apply politeness norms to virtual humans. Participants were tutored either by a human tutor or a virtual human tutor that varied in features and then evaluated the tutor’s performance. Results indicate that virtual humans can produce social facilitation not only with facial appearance but also with voice. In addition, performance in the presence of voice synced facial appearance seems to elicit stronger social facilitation than in the presence of voice only or face only. Similar findings were observed with the politeness norm experiment. Participants who evaluated their tutor directly reported the tutor’s performance more favorably than participants who evaluated their tutor indirectly. This valence toward the voice synced facial appearance had no statistical difference compared to the valence toward the human tutor condition. The results suggest that designers of virtual humans should be mindful about the social nature of virtual humans.
Highlights
Interest in virtual humans or embodied conversational agents is growing in the realm of human computer interaction (HCI)
We reviewed the current literature on human-computer interaction, human-robot interaction, and ordinary personology to understand the cognitive process behind the social responses to virtual humans
Nass’s research method is essentially a Turing test [19] but assesses non-human entities’ social capability rather than a machine’s ability to demonstrate intelligence. His procedure is to take a well-established study from social psychology, replace the person in the study with a computer, and assess whether the results of the study are equivalent to the original study with a person, that is, whether participants behave in the same way when interacting with a computer as they would have with a human
Summary
Interest in virtual humans or embodied conversational agents is growing in the realm of human computer interaction (HCI). Our research is directed towards gaining a deeper understanding of the social dimension of the interaction between humans and virtual humans. We are interested in whether a virtual human elicits stronger social responses as it is provided with more human-like characteristics. We reviewed the current literature on human-computer interaction, human-robot interaction, and ordinary personology to understand the cognitive process behind the social responses to virtual humans. The number of human-like characteristics may impact the likelihood with which a virtual human is categorized as human. To test this hypothesis, we conducted two experiments: (1) a social facilitation experiment and (2) a politeness norm experiment. Details on methods and results will follow in addition of the discussion to their generalizability and limitations
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