Skip to main content

A Second Chance to Make a First Impression? How Appearance and Nonverbal Behavior Affect Perceived Warmth and Competence of Virtual Agents over Time

  • Conference paper

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNAI,volume 7502)

Abstract

First impressions of others are fundamental for the further development of a relationship and are thus of major importance for the design of virtual agents, too. We addressed the question whether there is a second chance for first impressions with regard to the major dimensions of social cognition–warmth and competence. We employed a novel experimental set-up that combined agent appearance (robot-like vs. human-like) and agent behavior (gestures present vs. absent) of virtual agents as between-subject factors with a repeated measures design. Results indicate that ratings of warmth depend on interaction effects of time and agent appearance, while evaluations of competence seem to depend on the interaction of time and nonverbal behavior. Implications of these results for basic and applied research on intelligent virtual agents will be discussed .

Keywords

  • Evaluation
  • agent appearance
  • nonverbal behavior
  • warmth
  • competence

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (Canada)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (Canada)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (Canada)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Bailenson, J.N., Swinth, K., Hoyt, C., Persky, S., Dimov, A., Blascovich, J.: 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 14(4), 379–393 (2005)

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  2. Bente, G., Krämer, N.C., Jan Peter de Ruiter, A.P.: Computer animated movement and person perception: Methodological advances in nonverbal behavior research. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 25(3), 151–166 (2001)

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  3. Bergmann, K., Kopp, S.: GNetIc – Using Bayesian Decision Networks for Iconic Gesture Generation. In: Ruttkay, Z., Kipp, M., Nijholt, A., Vilhjálmsson, H.H. (eds.) IVA 2009. LNCS, vol. 5773, pp. 76–89. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  4. Bergmann, K., Kopp, S.: Increasing expressiveness for virtual agents–Autonomous generation of speech and gesture in spatial description tasks. In: Decker, K., Sichman, J., Sierra, C., Castelfranchi, C. (eds.) Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, Budapest, Hungary, pp. 361–368 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Bergmann, K., Kopp, S., Eyssel, F.: Individualized gesturing outperforms average gesturing – evaluating gesture production in virtual humans. In: Allbeck, J., Badler, N., Bickmore, T., Pelachaud, C., Safonova, A. (eds.) IVA 2010. LNCS, vol. 6356, pp. 104–117. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Bickmore, T., Cassell, J.: Social dialogue with embodied conversational agents. In: van Kuppevelt, J., Dybkjaer, L., Bernsen, N. (eds.) Advances in Natural, Multimodal Dialogue Systems. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Brooks, R.: Humanoid robots. Communications of the ACM 45(3), 33–38 (2002)

    CrossRef  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  8. Buisine, S., Martin, J.C.: The effects of speech-gesture cooperation in animated agents’ behavior in multimedia presentations. Interacting with Computers 19, 484–493 (2007)

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  9. Cassell, J., Thórisson, K.: The power of a nod and a glance: Envelope vs. emotional feedback in animated conversational agents. Applied Artificial Intelligence 13, 519–538 (1999)

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  10. Cuddy, A.J., Glick, P., Beninger, A.: The dynamics of warmth and competence judgments, and their outcomes in organizations. Research in Organizational Behavior 31, 73–98 (2011)

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  11. Dautenhahn, K.: Robots as social actors: Aurora and the case of autism. In: Proceedings of the Third International Cognitive Technology Conference (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Fiske, S.T., Cuddy, A.J., Glick, P.: Universal dimensions of social cognition: Warmth and competence. Trends in Cognitive Science 11(2), 77–83 (2006)

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  13. Garau, M., Slater, M., Vinayagamoorthy, V., Brogni, A., Steed, A., Sasse, M.A.: The impact of avatar realism and eye gaze control on perceived quality of communication in a shared immersive virtual environment. In: Proceedings of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 529–536 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Goetz, J., Kiesler, S., Powers, A.: Matching robot appearance and behavior to tasks to improve human-robot cooperation. In: Proceedingsof the 12th IEEE Workshop om Robot and Human Interactive Communication (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Heylen, D., van Es, I., Nijholt, A., van Dijk, B.: Experimenting with the gaze of a conversational agent. In: Proceedings International CLASS Workshop on Natural, Intelligent and Effective Interaction in Multimodal Dialogue Systems, pp. 93–100 (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Hinds, P.J., Roberts, T.L., Jones, H.: Whose job is it anyway? a study of human-robot interaction in a collaborative task. Human Computer Interaction 19(1), 151–181 (2004)

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  17. Hoffmann, L., Krämer, N.C., Lam-chi, A., Kopp, S.: Media Equation Revisited: Do Users Show Polite Reactions towards an Embodied Agent? In: Ruttkay, Z., Kipp, M., Nijholt, A., Vilhjálmsson, H.H. (eds.) IVA 2009. LNCS, vol. 5773, pp. 159–165. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  18. Kelley, H.: The warm-cold variable in first impressions of persons. Journal of Personality 18, 431–439 (1950)

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  19. Komatsu, T., Kurosawa, R., Yamada, S.: Difference between users’ expectations and perceptions about a robotic agent (adaptation gap) affect their behaviors. In: Proceedings of the HRI 2011 Workshop Expectations in Intuitive Human-robot Interaction (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Krämer, N.C., Tietz, B., Bente, G.: Effects of Embodied Interface Agents and Their Gestural Activity. In: Rist, T., Aylett, R.S., Ballin, D., Rickel, J. (eds.) IVA 2003. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2792, pp. 292–300. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  21. Krämer, N.C.: Soziale Wirkungen virtueller Helfer–Gestaltung und Evaluation von Mensch-Computer Interaktion. Verlag W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Mori, M.: The Buddha in the robot. Charles E. Tuttle Co., Tokyo (1982)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Niewiadomski, R., Demeure, V., Pelachaud, C.: Warmth, competence, believability and virtual agents. In: Allbeck, J., Badler, N., Bickmore, T., Pelachaud, C., Safonova, A. (eds.) IVA 2010. LNCS, vol. 6356, pp. 272–285. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Nishio, S., Ishiguro, H.: Attitude change induced by different appearances of interaction agents. International Journal of Machine Consciousness 3(1), 115–126 (2011)

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  25. Peplau, L., Taylor, S., Sears, D.: Social Psychology. Prentice Hall (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Rehm, M., André, E.: Informing the design of agents by corpus analysis. In: Nishida, T., Nakano, Y. (eds.) Conversational Informatics. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Schröder, M., Trouvain, J.: The German text-to-speech synthesis system MARY: A tool for research, development and teaching. International Journal of Speech Technology 6, 365–377 (2003)

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  28. Skowronski, J., Amady, N. (eds.): First Impressions. The Guilford Press (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Sträfling, N., Fleischer, I., Polzer, C., Leutner, D., Krämer, N.C.: Teaching learning strategies with a pedagogical agent: The effects of a virtual tutor and its appearance on learning and motivation. Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications 22(2), 73–83 (2010)

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  30. Woods, S., Dautenhahn, K., Schulz, J.: The design space of robots: Investigating children’s views. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, pp. 47–52 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

Copyright information

© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Bergmann, K., Eyssel, F., Kopp, S. (2012). A Second Chance to Make a First Impression? How Appearance and Nonverbal Behavior Affect Perceived Warmth and Competence of Virtual Agents over Time. In: Nakano, Y., Neff, M., Paiva, A., Walker, M. (eds) Intelligent Virtual Agents. IVA 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7502. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33197-8_13

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33197-8_13

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-33196-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-33197-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)