This experimental study investigated the impact of interface agent appearance (age, gender, “coolness”) on enhancing undergraduate females’ attitudes toward engineering. Results revealed that participants reported more positive stereotypes of engineers after interacting with a female agent. In contrast, participants interacting with a male agent reported that engineering was more useful and engaging. An interaction of “coolness ” and age indicated that agents who were young and “cool” (i.e., peer-like; similar to participants) and agents who were old and “uncool ” (stereotypical engineers) were both most effective on enhancing self-efficacy toward engineering. Keywords Interface agents, persuasion, attitude change, anthropomorphic interfaces, agent appearance, computer-based social modeling

This article illustrates the utility of using virtual environments to transform social interaction via behavior and context, with the goal of improving learning in digital environments. We first describe the technology and theories behind virtual environments and then report data from 4 empirical studies. In Experiment 1, we demonstrated that teachers with augmented social perception (i.e., receiving visual warnings alerting them to students not receiving enough teacher eye gaze) were able to

Abstract. Virtual humans are animated, lifelike characters capable of freespeech and nonverbal interaction with human users. In this paper, we describe the development of two virtual human characters for teaching the skill of deception detection. An accompanying tutoring system provides solicited hints on what to ask during an interview and unsolicited feedback that identifies properties of truthful and deceptive statements uttered by the characters. We present the results of an experiment comparing use of virtual humans with tutoring against a no-interaction (baseline) condition and a didactic condition. The didactic group viewed a slide show consisting of recorded videos along with descriptions of properties of deception and truth-telling. Results revealed that both groups significantly outperformed the no-interaction control group in a binary decision task to identify truth or deception in video statements. No significant differences were found between the training conditions.

pedagogical agent which incorporates a text mining tool

What will it be like to admit Artificial Companions into our society? How will they change our relations with each other? How important will they be in the emotional and practical lives of their owners---since we know that people became emotionally dependent even on simple devices like the Tamagotchi? How much social life might they have in contacting each other? The contributors to this book assume that some form of long-term computer Companions are now a certainty in the coming years, and that it is a good moment to consider from a set of wide interdisciplinary perspectives, both how we shall construct them technically as well as their personal and social consequences. By Companions we mean conversationalists or confidants----not robots--- but rather computer software agents whose function will be to get to know their owners, who may well be elderly or lonely, and focusing not only on assistance via the internet (contacts, travel, doctors etc.) that many still find hard to use, but also on providing company and Companionship, by offering aspects of personalization. The human-Companion relationship could also be used to build a life narrative of the owner, eliciting over a long period a structure of the owner's life, perhaps in a level of detail that even their relatives might not recognize, or know about. You could call that autobiography