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First Impressions: Users’ Judgments of Virtual Agents’ Personality and Interpersonal Attitude in First Encounters

  • Conference paper

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

Abstract

In first encounters people quickly form impressions of each other’s personality and interpersonal attitude. We conducted a study to investigate how this transfers to first encounters between humans and virtual agents. In the study, subjects’ avatars approached greeting agents in a virtual museum rendered in both first and third person perspective. Each agent exclusively exhibited nonverbal immediacy cues (smile, gaze and proximity) during the approach. Afterwards subjects judged its personality (extraversion) and interpersonal attitude (hostility/friendliness). We found that within only 12.5 seconds of interaction subjects formed impressions of the agents based on observed behavior. In particular, proximity had impact on judgments of extraversion whereas smile and gaze on friendliness. These results held for the different camera perspectives. Insights on how the interpretations might change according to the user’s own personality are also provided.

Keywords

  • first impressions
  • personality traits
  • interpersonal attitude
  • empirical evaluation
  • nonverbal behavior
  • camera perspectives

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Cafaro, A., Vilhjálmsson, H.H., Bickmore, T., Heylen, D., Jóhannsdóttir, K.R., Valgarðsson, G.S. (2012). First Impressions: Users’ Judgments of Virtual Agents’ Personality and Interpersonal Attitude in First Encounters. 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_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33197-8_7

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-33196-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-33197-8

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