How Is Believability of a Virtual Agent Related to Warmth, Competence, Personification, and Embodiment?

Abstract

The term "believability" is often used to describe expectations concerning virtual agents. In this paper, we analyze which factors influence the believability of the agent acting as the software assistant. We consider several factors such as embodiment, communicative behavior, and emotional capabilities. We conduct a perceptive study where we analyze the role of plausible and/or appropriate emotional displays in relation to believability. We also investigate how people judge the believability of the agent, and whether it provokes social reactions of humans toward it. Finally, we evaluate the respective impact of embodiment and emotion over believability judgments. The results of our study show that (a) appropriate emotions lead to higher perceived believability, (b) the notion of believability is closely correlated with the two major socio-cognitive variables, namely competence and warmth, and (c) considering an agent as believable can be different from having a human-like attitude toward it. Finally, a primacy of emotion behavior over embodiment while judging believability is also hypothesized from free responses given by the participants of this experiment.

Investigating Macroexpressions and Microexpressions in Computer Graphics Animated Faces

“…Their experiments showed that that participants were able to notice the differences between genuine and faked smiles. Approaches to evaluating a virtual character's believability are also presented in (Rehm, 2008;Demeure et al, 2011;de Melo et al, 2011), in the context of virtual agents applications. Research focused in the perception of different types of smiles using CG characters are found in (Ochs & Pelachaud, 2012).…”

“…Although there have been great advances in modeling, rigging, rendering, motion capture and retargeting techniques -with the goal of escaping the "Uncanny Valley" (Alexander, Rogers, Lambeth, Chiang, & Debevec, 2009;McDonnell, Breidt, & Bülthoff, 2012) -the creation of realistic and convincing face behaviors for games and movies is still strongly dependent on animator skills. There are some studies about how to convey and evaluate a character's complex facial behaviors (Paleari & Lisetti, 2006;Bevacqua, Mancini, Niewiadomski, & Pelachaud, 2007;Rehm, 2008;Orvalho & Sousa, 2009;Niewiadomski, Hyniewska, & Pelachaud, 2009;Queiroz, Braun, et al, 2010;Demeure, Niewiadomski, & Pelachaud, 2011;de Melo, Carnevale, & Gratch, 2011;Xolocotzin Eligio, Ainsworth, & Crook, 2012), but few really focus on microexpressions (Zielke, Dufour, & Hardee, 2011).…”

Towards Interactional Symbiosis: Epistemic Balance and Co-presence in a Quantified Self Experiment

“…That is, some utterances would display a primary knowledge access from the robot's point of view, whereas others would be more balanced towards the participant. Third, we have drawn from the pair Warmth/Competence that is used to study the believability of AI [9], to build the robot's profile. That is, some utterances would be supposed to display a Competence feature (e.g.…”

Students' Experiences of Emotional Connection with Pedagogical Agents

“…For example, the perceived trustworthiness of agents has been shown to increase with degrees of anthromorphism , as has the believability of the agent (Demeure, Niewiadomski, & Pelachaud, 2011). Consequently, researchers have turned their attention to the realism of agents in educational settings.…”

“…Furthermore, split-attention effect (Garau et al, 2003), in which students experience a higher cognitive load due to competing demands for their attention, occurred when students felt an agent's voice and appearance did not match and were therefore distracted from the learning activity at hand. The impact of split-attention affect is significant; it reduces the believability and, consequently, willingness to trust the agent (Demeure et al, 2011). Attention has also been paid to appearance and self-awareness .…”