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2015 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Do We Differ in Our Dispositional Tendency to Perceive Virtual Agents as Animate Beings?

The Influence of User Factors in the Evaluation of Virtual Agents

Authors : Benny Liebold, Daniel Pietschmann, Peter Ohler

Published in: Human-Computer Interaction: Users and Contexts

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

With few exceptions, the role of user factors in the evaluation of virtual agents has largely been neglected. By taking them into account properly, researchers and virtual agent developers might be able to better understand interindividual differences in virtual agent evaluations. We propose the animacy attribution tendency as a novel user factor that assesses a users individual threshold to accept virtual entities as living and animate beings. Users scoring higher in animacy attribution tendency should accept anomalies in virtual agent behavior more easily and thus provide favorable evaluations. To investigate the impact of this novel concept along with other user factors, we first developed a test to assess interindividual differences of animacy attribution and subsequently carried out an online-study, during which participants had to evaluate video recordings of different virtual agents.

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Footnotes
1
The correlation turns out to be statistically significant due to higher test power, when the complete sample (N = 81) was analyzed, r = – .24, p < .05.
 
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Metadata
Title
Do We Differ in Our Dispositional Tendency to Perceive Virtual Agents as Animate Beings?
Authors
Benny Liebold
Daniel Pietschmann
Peter Ohler
Copyright Year
2015
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21006-3_43