First impressions in user-agent encounters: the impact of an agent's nonverbal behavior on users' relational decisions

Authors:
Angelo Cafaro;Hannes H. Vilhjálmsson;Timothy W. Bickmore;Dirk Heylen;Daniel Schulman
Affiliations:
Reykjavik University, Reykjavik, Iceland;Reykjavik University, Reykjavik, Iceland;Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA;University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands;Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA
Venue:
Proceedings of the 2013 international conference on Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems
Year:
2013

Citing 2
Cited 0

Establishing and maintaining long-term human-computer relationships

ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI)
First impressions: users' judgments of virtual agents' personality and interpersonal attitude in first encounters

IVA'12 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents

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Abstract

We present an empirical study that investigates whether the first impressions that users form of a virtual agent have an impact on attitudes and subsequent relational behavior. Subjects experienced brief approaches to several embodied agent guides in an immersive 3D virtual museum environment. Each guide exhibited two levels (low vs. high) of extraversion and friendliness towards the subjects by using nonverbal immediacy cues of smile, gaze and proxemics. We found that the nonverbal behavior exhibited by our guides in these 12.5 second encounters, had significant effects on subjects' relational decisions in terms of how likely and how often they would like to spend time with the guides on virtual tours. In particular, guide friendliness, expressed by smiling and gazing more at the subjects, had a positive main effect for all our measures.