The effects of virtual agent humor and gaze behavior on human-virtual agent proxemics

Authors:
Peter Khooshabeh;Sudeep Gandhe;Cade McCall;Jonathan Gratch;Jim Blascovich;David Traum
Affiliations:
USC Institute for Creative Technologies, Los Angeles, CA;USC Institute for Creative Technologies, Los Angeles, CA;MPI Cognitive and Brain Sciences;USC Institute for Creative Technologies, Los Angeles, CA;UCSB Department of Psychology, Santa Barbara, CA;USC Institute for Creative Technologies, Los Angeles, CA
Venue:
IVA'11 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Intelligent virtual agents
Year:
2011

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Does it matter if a computer jokes

CHI '11 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems

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Abstract

We study whether a virtual agent that delivers humor through verbal behavior can affect an individual's proxemic behavior towards the agent. Participants interacted with a virtual agent through natural language and, in a separate task, performed an embodied interpersonal interaction task in a virtual environment. The study used minimum distance as the dependent measure. Humor generated by the virtual agent through a text chat did not have any significant effects on the proxemic task. This is likely due to the experimental constraint of only allowing participants to interact with a disembodied agent through a textual chat dialogue.