Do You Forgive Past Mistakes of Animated Agents? A Study of Instances of Assistance by Animated Agents

Many studies on human–computer interaction have demonstrated that the visual appearance of an agent or a robot significantly influences people’s perceptions and behaviors. Several studies on the appearance of agents/robots have concluded that consistency between expectations from an agent’s or a robot’s appearance and performances was an important factor to the continuous use of these agents/robots. This is because users would stop interacting with the agents/robots when predictions are not met by actual experiences. However, previous studies mainly focused on the consistency between an initial expectation and a performance of a single instance of a task. The influence of the orders of successes or failures for more than one instance of a task has not been examined in detail. Therefore, in this study, we investigate the order effects of how the timing of sufficient or insufficient results of animated agents affects user evaluation. This will lead to the contribution to fill the lack of studies regarding more than one task in the field of human–computer interaction and to realize the continuous use of agents/robots as long as possible and to avoid stopping to use the agents/robots owing to their successful design. We create a simulated retrieval website and conduct an experiment using retrieval assistant agents that show both sufficient and insufficient results for more than one instance of retrieval tasks. The experimental results demonstrated a recency effect wherein the users significantly revised their evaluations of the animated agents based on new information more than that based on initial evaluations. The investigation of the case of repeated instances of a task and the influence of successes or failures is important for designing intelligent agents that may show incomplete results in intelligent tasks. Furthermore, the result of this study will contribute to build strategies to design behaviors of agents/robots that have a high or low evaluation based on their appearance in advance to prevent users from stopping use of the agents/robots.

Judging a Book by Its Cover: Assessing the Comprehensibility and Perceived Appearance of Sign Language Avatars

The use of avatars is gaining popularity in today’s digitalized world. These computer-animated agents not only act as virtual shopping assistants to compensate for the impersonal feel of an online store, but are also frequently employed in gaming and social networking, and have recently served as animated characters for translation in the deaf community. New technological developments (sign language avatars) offer significant advantages for deaf users in daily interactions. This article explores how attitudes towards avatars, and subsequent satisfaction with the design company involved, can be increased through various measures. This experimental study manipulates the physical traits of signing avatars (gender, hairstyle, and dress) and analyses the outcomes in terms of their perceived properties, appearance, and comprehensibility, as well as more direct indicators of success (attitudes towards these avatars and satisfaction with the company). An industry partner cooperated in the empirical study to ensure the external validity of the findings.

The Impact of Ethnically Matched Animated Agents (Avatars) in the Cognitive Restructuring of Irrational Career Beliefs Held by Young Women

The Believe It! program developed and evaluated by was the first interactive, multimedia, psychological-education intervention deployed on the Internet. In a controlled study, the authors reported that the ethnically diverse cartoon models were partially successful in using cognitive restructuring to promote more reasonable career beliefs among Caucasian middle-school young women. It was not clear if the program's lack of efficacy among minority young women was due to computer literacy factors affected by SES. Subsequently, four studies explored the role of matching or mismatching the ethnicity of animated agents in a graphically enhanced program with young women receiving the cognitive restructuring treatment. Each of the studies used the same four outcome measures (Occupational Sex-Role Questionnaire, Believe It Measure, Career Beliefs Inventory, and the Career Myths Scale) before and after matched and mismatched participants received the Believe It! intervention. analyzed data from African-American participants, Latinas, Asian-Americans, and ethnically isolated Caucasian young women. The current article reports that the results of these four studies are consistent with similar research involving live counselor and client dyads (e.g., ). The Believe It! program had a clear impact on ethnically matched African-American young women, whereas pairings on ethnicity produced, at best, marginally improved outcomes for Latinas, Asian-Americans, and ethnically isolated Caucasian young women.