The Roles of Animated Pedagogical Agents’ Presence and Nonverbal Communication in Multimedia Learning Environments
Abstract
We examined how the presence and nonverbal communication of an animated pedagogical agent affects students’ perceptions and learning. College students learned about astronomy either without an agent’s image or with an agent under one of the following conditions: a static agent (S), an agent with deictic movements (D), an agent with facial expressions (E), or an agent with both deictic movements and facial expressions (DE). Group S outperformed group E on a comprehension test, but no other differences were found on students’ learning or perceptions. The results show that the presence of the studied agent – regardless of nonverbal abilities – did not produce at least a moderate effect size. Further, a static version of the agent was preferable to one with only facial expressions.
References
(2002). Optimizing learning from examples using pedagogical agents. Journal of Educational Psychology, 94, 416–427.
(2005). The independent and interactive effects of embodied-agent appearance and behavior on self-report, cognitive, and behavioral markers of copresence in immersive virtual environments. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 14, 379–393.
(2000). Virtual solar system project: Building understanding through model building. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 37, 719–756.
(1999). Intelligent agents as cognitive tools for education. Educational Technology, 39(2), 36–40.
(2002). Agent-based learning environments for investigating teaching and learning. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 26, 249–270.
(2008). The effects of agent nonverbal communication on procedural and attitudinal learning outcomes. In , IVA 2008: LNAI 5208 (pp. 208–214). Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
(2003). Does the presence of image and animation enhance pedagogical agent persona? Journal of Educational Computing Research, 28, 373–395.
(2002). Immersive virtual environment technology as a methodological tool for social psychology. Psychological Inquiry, 13, 103–124.
(1971). Human teaching for human learning: An introduction to confluent education. New York: Viking.
(2000). Embodied conversational agents. Cambridge, MA: The MIT.
(2006). The role of gesture in learning: Do children use their hands to change their minds? Journal of Cognition and Development, 7, 211–232.
(2002). Does an agent matter? The effects of animated conversational agents on multimedia environments. Proceedings for ED-MEDIA 2002: World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia, and Telecommunications, Norfolk, VA, 357–362.
(2002). Animated pedagogical agents in multimedia educational environments: Effects of agent properties, picture features, and redundancy. Journal of Educational Psychology, 94, 428–434.
(2000). The impact of animated interface agents: A review of empirical research. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 52, 1–22.
(2001). The impact of eye gaze on communication using humanoid avatars. SIGCHI’01 Proceedings, Seattle, WA, (pp.309–316).
(2005). The responses of people to virtual humans in an immersive virtual environment. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 14(1), 104–116.
(2007). Virtual humans and persuasion: The effects of agency and behavioral realism. Media Psychology, 10, 1–22.
(1997). Social presence as a predictor of satisfaction within a computer mediated conferencing environment. American Journal of Distance Education, 11(3), 8–26.
(2002). Physics, Volume 1. New York: Wiley.
(1993). Reducing cognitive load in multimedia navigation. Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 9, 157–181.
(2003). Social inhibition in immersive virtual environments. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 12, 183–195.
(1997). Readings in agents. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.
(2000). Animated pedagogical agents: Face-to-face interaction in interactive learning environments. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 11, 47–78.
(2008). Social effects of virtual assistants. A review of empirical results with regard to communication. In , IVA 2008: LNAI 5208 (pp. 507–508). Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
(2003). Effects of embodied interface agents and their gestural activity. In , IVA 2003: LNAI 2792 (pp. 292–300). Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
(2007). Facial dynamics as indicators of trustworthiness and cooperative behavior. Emotion, 7, 730–735.
(1988). Motivational considerations in the study of instruction. Cognition and Instruction, 5, 289–309.
(1997). Animated pedagogical agents and problem-solving effectiveness: A large-scale empirical evaluation. In , Proceedings of the 8th world conference on artificial intelligence in education (pp. 23–30). Washington, DC: IOS Press.
(1997, August). Cosmo: A life-like animated pedagogical agent with deictic believability. Working notes of the IJCAI ’97 Workshop on Animated Interface Agents: Making them intelligent Nagoya, Japan, (pp. 61–69).
. (2001). Factors that influence the perception of feedback delivered by a pedagogical agent. International Journal of Speech Technology, 4, 145–153.
(2003). Nine ways to reduce cognitive load in multimedia learning. Educational Psychologist, 38(1), 43–52.
(2000). Evaluating an animated pedagogical agent. In , Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems: LNCS 1839 (pp. 73–82). Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
(2001). Contributions to learning in an agent-based multimedia environment: A methods-media distinction. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Techniques, USA, 145, (pp. 464–465).
(2005). Multimedia learning with animated pedagogical agents. In , Cambridge handbook of multimedia learning (pp. 507–524). New York: Cambridge University.
(2006). Students’ choice of animated pedagogical agents in science learning: A test of the similarity attraction hypothesis on gender and ethnicity. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 31, 186–207.
(2001). The case for social agency in computer-based teaching: Do students learn more deeply when they interact with animated pedagogical agents? Cognition and Instruction, 19, 177–213.
(2003). Emotion in intelligent virtual agents: The flow model of emotion. In , IVA 2003: LNAI 2792 (pp. 31–38). Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
(1970). The Uncanny Valley. Energy, 7, 33–35.
(2001). Affective pedagogical agents and user persuasion. In , Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 397–401). New Orleans, LA: UAHCI.
(2007). SPSS survival manual (3rd ed.). Maidenhead, UK: Open University.
(2000). The effects of animated characters on anxiety, task performance, and evaluations of user interfaces. Proceedings of ACM CHI 2000: Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York, (49–56). New York, NY: ACM Press.
(1993). Freedom to learn (3rd ed.). New York: Merrill.
(2003). Physics for scientists and engineers (3rd ed.). Belmont, CA: Brooks Cole.
(1998). The place of confluent education in the human potential movement. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
(2000). Small group behavior in a virtual and real environment: A comparative study. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 9, 37–51.
(1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive Science, 12, 257–285.
(1995). Situated facial displays: Towards social interaction. In , Human Factors in Computing Systems: CHI’95 Conference Proceedings (pp. 450–455). New York: ACM Press.
(1973). Beyond words: Nonverbal communication in the classroom. Hampshire, UK: MacMillan.
(1998). Coherent gestures, locomotion, and speech in life-like pedagogical agents. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, San Francisco, 13–20.
(1998). The persona effect: How substantial is it? Proceedings of the Human Computer Interaction Conference, Berlin, (pp. 53–66). Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
(2001). Eye gaze patterns in conversations: There is more to conversational agents than meets the eyes. SIGCHI’01 Proceedings, Seattle, WA, (pp. 301–308). New York, NY: ACM Press.
(1994). Using a human face in an interface. Proceedings of ACM CHI ’94 Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York, (pp. 85–91). New York, NY: ACM Press.
(2007). A meta-analysis of the impact of the inclusion and realism of human-like faces on user experiences in interfaces. CHI 2007 Proceedings: Faces and Bodies in Interaction, San Jose, CA, (pp. 1–10). New York, NY: ACM SIGCHI.
