Embodied Agents Research Articles

擬人化エージェントによるAR道案内システム

擬人化エージェントによるAR道案内システム

Evaluation of affective embodied agents in an information literacy game

Digital game-based learning (DGBL) has become increasingly popular. With elements such as narratives, rewards, rules, and interactivity, DGBL can actively engage learners, stimulating desired learning outcomes. In an effort to increase its appeal, affective embodied agents (EAs) have been incorporated into DGBL as learning companions or instructors. However, claims about the efficacy of using affective EAs in DGBL have scarcely been subjected to empirical analysis. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the influence of affective EAs on students' learning outcome, motivation, enjoyment, perceived usefulness, and behavioral intention in an information literacy (IL) game. In total, 159 tertiary students were recruited and randomly assigned in a pre-test post-test between-subjects experiment with three conditions: affective-EA, neutral-EA, and no-EA. Results suggested that students benefited from interacting with the affective EA in the IL game, in terms of learning motivation, enjoyment, perceived usefulness and behavioral intention. However, there was no significant difference in learning outcome.

An embodied agent helps anxious students in mathematics learning

Mathematics anxiety is known to be detrimental to mathematics learning. This study explored if an embodied agent could be used to help alleviate student anxiety in classrooms. To examine this potential, agent-guided algebra lessons were developed, in which an animated agent was equipped with prescriptive instructional guidance and anxiety treating messages. The lessons were deployed in regular mathematics classrooms, one lesson per day over a week, with 138 boys and girls in the 9th grade in the United States. After taking the weeklong agent-based lessons, students decreased in their mathematics anxiety (p = .042) and increased in mathematics learning (p = .001), regardless of the presence or absence of the agents’ anxiety messages. The presence of the agents’ messages only seemed to make a difference for high-anxiety students. This finding suggests that an embodied agent could provide affective support for students with special needs.

The effects of animated pedagogical agents in an English-as-a-foreign-language learning environment

Animated pedagogical agents (APAs) have frequently been used as a powerful addition to learning environments, since APAs have been known to facilitate learning. APAs can present various features, such as voice, movements, gestures and pointing, and researchers have sought to verify specifically which features of agents effectively contribute to learning. Previous studies have studied these features by comparing different degrees of agent embodiment in the evaluation of the image effect (i.e., students learn more when learning systems have visual APAs), the embodied agent effect (i.e., fully embodied agents that deliver instruction aurally and use gestures to improve learning outcomes in text-only learning systems), the modality effect (i.e., oral instruction contributes to the learning process), and the expressiveness effect (i.e., fully embodied agents promote more effective learning than static ones). Some of these studies have investigated the image, embodied agent and modality effects in the same learning environment, but they were not the same studies that investigated the expressiveness effect. The expressiveness effect allows us to separate the movements of the agent from its other features, such as the agent's image, so investigating this effect is as important as investigating the other effects. We are not aware of any studies that investigated all of these four effects within the same learning system, nor that evaluated any of these effects in language learning environments. Accordingly, this paper describes the design, implementation, and analysis of an APA designed to evaluate the abovementioned effects. The APA was integrated into a computer-assisted language learning (CALL) system to teach English as a foreign language to Brazilian students. A total of 72 Brazilian undergraduate students were divided into four groups, each of which used a different version of the APA in the same CALL system: no agent, a voice-only agent, a static agent, or a fully embodied agent. We compared students' gain scores (i.e., difference between pre- and posttest scores) across groups to evaluate each of the four effects. Though the outcomes of our study supported the presence of the embodied agent and modality effects, we were not able to demonstrate the image or expressiveness effects in the experiment. Our results indicate that the voice of the agent might contribute more positively to learning than movements, gestures and pointing. HighlightsWe investigated degrees of APA embodiment in CALL systems.We implemented a CALL system and an Animated Pedagogical Agent for Brazilian students.Gain scores from using different APA versions were compared to analyze agent effects.Modality and Embodied Effects were found, Image and Expressiveness Effects were not.

Application of Expectancy Violations Theory to communication with and judgments about embodied agents during a decision-making task

Because users treat embodied agents (EAs) as social actors, users hold expectations about human-to-EA communication (HtEAC) similar to those in human-to-human communication. This study extends Expectancy Violations Theory (EVT) to examine how different forms of interfaces that confirm or violate user expectations affect the communication process, social judgments, ability to influence, and accuracy of recall associated with HtEAC. Positive violations of expectancy are acts or characteristics of the EA that are unexpected but evaluated favorably by the human partner. Results suggest that when the EA deviates from expectations, effects on the HtEAC process and related outcomes can be more pronounced. EAs evaluated as positive violations had more favorable effects on task attractiveness than other human or EA interaction partners. As predicted by EVT, EA interactions that were positively evaluated elicited more perceived connectedness, feelings of being understood/receptivity, and dependability than those EA interactions evaluated negatively. However, negative violations did not produce worse outcomes than negative confirmations. EVT offers a useful lens for examining the communication effects of HtEAC and points to benefits of creating EAs that evoke positive violations of expectancy.

The effectiveness and acceptance of an affective information literacy tutorial

Due to the ready access to large amounts of information afforded by the Internet, information literacy (IL) has taken on an important role. Recent developments in affective computing have provided more opportunities in the way online IL education can be delivered. However, research on how affective computing can be used in IL education is lacking. The research objectives of this study are therefore twofold: to investigate the influence of affective embodied agents (EAs) on students' motivation, enjoyment, knowledge retention and intention to use; and to uncover factors influencing their intention to use an online IL tutorial with affective EAs.To achieve these objectives, 285 university students were recruited to participate in a betweensubjects experiment (text-only, non-affective EAs, and affective EAs), including completing an IL tutorial and a post-test questionnaire. The results suggested that students benefited from the added use of an affective EA in the IL tutorials, in terms of learning motivation and enjoyment. Moreover, relevance, confidence, satisfaction, affective enjoyment, and behavioral enjoyment were found to be significant predictors for intention to use an IL tutorial with affective EAs.

Mirror mirror on the wall

Future Intelligent Environments will feature fixed and mobile display screens with socially-aware virtual embodied agents. This paper addresses the potential of virtual embodied agents to generate ...

Introduction: when embodied cognition and sport psychology team-up

I. One of the main undertakings of the embodied approach to cognition is to spell out effectively the intuition that our body shapes what our mind can do (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991; Gallagher 2005). This endeavor is motivated—among other things – by the deep sense of awe that cognitive scientists experience in front of the sophistication, flexibility, and variability that can be reached by the motor abilities of welltrained humans. In particular, excellence in sporting skills inspires embodied cognition by exhibiting tangible evidence that the details of our bodily constitution are not accidental to our mental powers, but define them in various inherent ways: not only because the informational processes that realize our intelligent functions are specifically regulated, distributed, filtered, or scaffolded by the physical and biological compound that implements them (Shapiro 2011); but also because the modes and the efficacy of our practical intelligence primarily depend on the originary unprincipled engagement with a perceptual environment that can only be discovered by and become meaningful to an embodied agent. It is the history of the recurrent interactions between body, environment, and social context that defines sophisticated patterns of sensorimotor correspondence, defining at once a worldly horizon of viable opportunities for action and a correlated embodied Bself^ that is ready to take advantage of these opportunities. Therefore, it is not just metaphorically that we speak of Bgood feet^ and Bquick hands^ as making a difference in the way a professional football player or a Formula One pilot perceive the world and skillfully cope with it, because the athlete’s conceptual understanding and decisionmaking capabilities build first of all on her situated expertise, i.e., on the development of a direct responsiveness to the surroundings, a readiness to anticipate and take advantage of the opportunities of action that the others cannot see. Maurice MerleauPonty (1945) used to characterize this practical, relational know-how as a sort of Btacit knowledge^ or Bknowledge in the hands^, a kind of proficiency that—as opposed to the conceptual knowledge based on explicit instructions, stored heuristics, and amodal representations – relies on the concrete familiarity with practical contexts and personal Phenom Cogn Sci (2015) 14:213–225 DOI 10.1007/s11097-015-9415-1

Including Conversational Agents into Structured Hybrid 3D Virtual Environments

Structured Hybrid 3D Virtual Environments are 3D virtual spaces where staff ;organisational; software agents support human users in their task achievement. These systems are characterized by: i- being hybrid, so that humans and software agents can interact; and ii; being structured and task oriented, so that interactions are regulated by a subjacent Organisation Centered Multi Agent System ;OCMAS; -an Electronic Institution ;EI;. The contribution of this paper is to include task-oriented conversational staff bots ;i.e. the embodiment of staff agents in the 3D environment; that communicate with users by using natural language. With this aim, we extend the Artificial Intelligence Mark-up Language ;AIML; with special tags to enable complex task-oriented conversations whose flow needs to consider both the states of the conversation and the ontology related to the task. We evaluate the usability of our conversational proposal and compare it to a previous command-based interaction system. Results show the conversational approach presents a higher user satisfaction than the command-based one. Moreover, in average, it also performs better in terms of efficiency, effectiveness and errors.

Mirror mirror on the wall

Future Intelligent Environments will feature fixed and mobile display screens with socially-aware virtual embodied agents. This paper addresses the potential of virtual embodied agents to generate a social connection with the inhabitants of Intelligent Environments. The goal of the study is to explore to what extent users mimic the behavior of an interactive agent. An experiment is conducted in which participants interact verbally with a virtual embodied agent. During the interaction, both the vocal pitch and the affective facial expressions of the agent are locally manipulated and the consecutive vocal and facial expressions of the participants registered. Computational analyses of the recorded expressions reveal vocal and facial mimicry as a sign of unconscious affect recognition and social connection. The implications of these results regarding the design of future Intelligent Environments are discussed.

Autonomy, Natality and Freedom: A Liberal Re-examination of Habermas in the Enhancement Debate

Jurgen Habermas has argued that carrying out pre-natal germline enhancements would be inimical to the future child's autonomy. In this article, I suggest that many of the objections that have been made against Habermas' arguments by liberals in the enhancement debate misconstrue his claims. To explain why, I begin by explaining how Habermas' view of personal autonomy confers particular importance to the agent's embodiment and social environment. In view of this, I explain that it is possible to draw two arguments against germline enhancements from Habermas' thought. I call these arguments ‘the argument from negative freedom’ and ‘the argument from natality’. Although I argue that many of the common liberal objections to Habermas are not applicable when his arguments are properly understood, I go on to suggest ways in which supporters of enhancement might appropriately respond to Habermas' arguments.

Quantifying Morphological Computation

The field of embodied intelligence emphasises the importance of the morphology and environment with respect to the behaviour of a cognitive system. The contribution of the morphology to the behaviour, commonly known as morphological computation, is well-recognised in this community. We believe that the field would benefit from a formalisation of this concept as we would like to ask how much the morphology and the environment contribute to an embodied agent’s behaviour, or how an embodied agent can maximise the exploitation of its morphology within its environment. In this work we derive two concepts of measuring morphological computation, and we discuss their relation to the Information Bottleneck Method. The first concepts asks how much the world contributes to the overall behaviour and the second concept asks how much the agent’s action contributes to a behaviour. Various measures are derived from the concepts and validated in two experiments that highlight their strengths and weaknesses.

APPROXIMATION OF EMPOWERMENT IN THE CONTINUOUS DOMAIN

The empowerment formalism offers a goal-independent utility function fully derived from an agent's embodiment. It produces intrinsic motivations which can be used to generate self-organizing behaviors in agents. One obstacle to the application of empowerment in more demanding (esp. continuous) domains is that previous ways of calculating empowerment have been very time consuming and only provided a proof-of-concept. In this paper we present a new approach to efficiently approximate empowerment as a parallel, linear, Gaussian channel capacity problem. We use pendulum balancing to demonstrate this new method, and compare it to earlier approximation methods.

Special Issue on Symbol Grounding

How can we achieve artificial systems that are capable of understanding human language? This question has been addressed by the field of artificial intelligence for decades and has undergone several paradigm shifts from rule-based approaches, proposing sets of symbolic rules to process language input to produce an intelligent behavior, to the insight that symbolic rules are not sufficient to deal with new situations, let alone new symbols, that have not been encountered before. Rather, it has been proposed that the symbols of a language need to be grounded in perception in order to allow for generalisation to new situations. This new formulation of the problem has been termed “Symbol Grounding” and proposes that any system capable of understanding symbols needs to be embodied in the sense that it has to be able to perceive its environment and to produce actions within this environment that cause significant changes and that these percepts and actions need to be tied to symbols that allow to abstract and thus to transfer knowledge. Research thus focuses either on simulated embodied agents or robots that are situated in a physical environment. Given the complex nature of the challenge, a range of different strands of research has emerged from which we tried to capture the most relevant ones in this Special Issue. Focusing on the development of grounding capabilities in infants brings in new perspectives and has, for example, lead to the insight that while the learning system has to be extremely adaptive to the environment, the social environment itself also adapts to the learner. In the contribution by Paul Vogt & J. Douglas Mastin it is thus discussed which aspects of such interactions should be modelled in artificial systems with a special focus on data “from the wild”.

Designing an assistive robot for older adults: The ROBADOM project

ObjectiveThe ROBADOM project was devoted to the design of a “robot butler”, capable of providing verbal and non-verbal interactions and feedbacks for assisting older adults at home. In this article we focused on the following issues: (1) study the social context for designing social robot; define the robot appearance and investigate the perceptions and attitudes of older adults towards an assistive robot; (2) examine the perception of the expressivity of the robot, the social signals showing the end-user engagement level and the role of agent embodiment during the interaction between older adults and a robot. MethodThe design of the studies involved both qualitative and experimental methods. Results & DiscussionSmall robots with some traits between human/animal and machine were appreciated by the participants. As regards services, cognitive stimulation, reminder and object localization were positively rated. Although the participants considered an assistive robot as useful, they were not yet ready to adopt it. The expressions of the robot were perceived differently in older and young adults. Thus, a robotic system dedicated to older adults should be tailored to the specific characteristics of this population. We also identified social signals as indicators of the user's engagement level during interaction. Finally, the issue of the added valued of a robotic system in comparison to a laptop was raised by our participants. Therefore, various issues (technological development, human-robot interaction, social context…) are to be explored before testing the impact of the robot at home.

Evoking Agency: Attention Model and Behavior Control in a Robotic Art Installation

Robotic embodiments of artificial agents seem to reinstate a body-mind dualism as consequence of their technical implementation, but could this supposition be a misconception? The authors present their artistic, scientific and engineering work on a robotic installation, the Articulated Head, and its perception-action control system, the Thinking Head Attention Model and Behavioral System (THAMBS). The authors propose that agency emerges from the interplay of the robot's behavior and the environment and that, in the system's interaction with humans, it is to the same degree attributed to the robot as it is grounded in the robot's actions: Agency cannot be instilled; it needs to be evoked.

Representations in Dynamical Embodied Agents: Re-Analyzing a Minimally Cognitive Model Agent

Understanding the role of ''representations'' in cognitive science is a fundamental problem facing the emerging framework of embodied, situated, dynamical cognition. To make progress, I follow the approach proposed by an influential representational skeptic, Randall Beer: building artificial agents capable of minimally cognitive behaviors and assessing whether their internal states can be considered to involve representations. Hence, I operationalize the concept of representing as ''standing in,'' and I look for representations in embodied agents involved in simple categorization tasks. In a first experiment, no representation can be found, but the relevance of the task is undermined by the fact that agents with no internal states can reach high performance. A simple modification makes the task more "representationally hungry," and in this case, agents' internal states are found to qualify as representations. I conclude by discussing the benefits of reconciling the embodied-dynamical approach with the notion of representation.

Animating synthetic dyadic conversations with variations based on context and agent attributes

ABSTRACTConversations between two people are ubiquitous in many inhabited contexts. The kinds of conversations that occur depend on several factors, including the time, the location of the participating agents, the spatial relationship between the agents, and the type of conversation in which they are engaged. The statistical distribution of dyadic conversations among a population of agents will therefore depend on these factors. In addition, the conversation types, flow, and duration will depend on agent attributes such as interpersonal relationships, emotional state, personal priorities, and socio‐cultural proxemics. We present a framework for distributing conversations among virtual embodied agents in a real‐time simulation. To avoid generating actual language dialogues, we express variations in the conversational flow by using behavior trees implementing a set of conversation archetypes. The flow of these behavior trees depends in part on the agents' attributes and progresses based on parametrically estimated transitional probabilities. With the participating agents' state, a ‘smart event’ model steers the interchange to different possible outcomes as it executes. Example behavior trees are developed for two conversation archetypes: buyer–seller negotiations and simple asking–answering; the model can be readily extended to others. Because the conversation archetype is known to participating agents, they can animate their gestures appropriate to their conversational state. The resulting animated conversations demonstrate reasonable variety and variability within the environmental context. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Adaptive eye gaze patterns in interactions with human and artificial agents

Efficient collaborations between interacting agents, be they humans, virtual or embodied agents, require mutual recognition of the goal, appropriate sequencing and coordination of each agent's behavior with others, and making predictions from and about the likely behavior of others. Moment-by-moment eye gaze plays an important role in such interaction and collaboration. In light of this, we used a novel experimental paradigm to systematically investigate gaze patterns in both human-human and human-agent interactions. Participants in the study were asked to interact with either another human or an embodied agent in a joint attention task. Fine-grained multimodal behavioral data were recorded including eye movement data, speech, first-person view video, which were then analyzed to discover various behavioral patterns. Those patterns show that human participants are highly sensitive to momentary multimodal behaviors generated by the social partner (either another human or an artificial agent) and they rapidly adapt their gaze behaviors accordingly. Our results from this data-driven approach provide new findings for understanding micro-behaviors in human-human communication which will be critical for the design of artificial agents that can generate human-like gaze behaviors and engage in multimodal interactions with humans.

An embodiment effect in computer-based learning with animated pedagogical agents.

How do social cues such as gesturing, facial expression, eye gaze, and human-like movement affect multimedia learning with onscreen agents? To help address this question, students were asked to twice view a 4-min narrated presentation on how solar cells work in which the screen showed an animated pedagogical agent standing to the left of 11 successive slides. Across three experiments, learners performed better on a transfer test when a human-voiced agent displayed human-like gestures, facial expression, eye gaze, and body movement than when the agent did not, yielding an embodiment effect. In Experiment 2 the embodiment effect was found when the agent spoke in a human voice but not in a machine voice. In Experiment 3, the embodiment effect was found both when students were told the onscreen agent was consistent with their choice of agent characteristics and when inconsistent. Students who viewed a highly embodied agent also rated the social attributes of the agent more positively than did students who viewed a nongesturing agent. The results are explained by social agency theory, in which social cues in a multimedia message prime a feeling of social partnership in the learner, which leads to deeper cognitive processing during learning, and results in a more meaningful learning outcome as reflected in transfer test performance.