Contextually relevant pedagogical agents: Visual appearance, stereotypes, and first impressions and their impact on learning

Computers and Education

Volumn 55, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 576-585

  Veletsianos, George ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN   (United States)

Author keywords

Contextual relevance; Pedagogical agents; Stereotypes; Virtual characters; Visual appearance

Indexed keywords

AGENT APPEARANCE; EXPERIMENTAL CONDITIONS; PEDAGOGICAL AGENTS; QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS; VIRTUAL CHARACTER; VISUAL APPEARANCE;

EDUCATION; VISUALIZATION;

LEARNING SYSTEMS;

EID: 77953128954     PISSN: 03601315     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/j.compedu.2010.02.019     Document Type: Article

References (34)

1. Alvarez-Torres M., Mishra P., and Zhao Y. Judging a book by its cover: cultural stereotyping of interactive media and its effect on the recall of text information. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia 10 2 (2001) 161-183
2. Bandura A. Social learning theory (1977), Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ
3. Bonito, J. A., Burgoon, J. K., & Bengtsson, B. (1999). The role of expectations in human-computer interaction. Paper presented at GROUP '99: International conference on supporting group work, Phoenix, AZ.
4. Branham S. Creating physical personalities for agents with faces: modeling trait impressions of the face. Proceedings of the UM 2001 workshop on attitudes, personality and emotions in user-adapted interactions (2001). http://www.di.uniba.it/intint/sonthofen/brahnam-f.pdf Sonthofen, Germany. Retrieved on December 10, 2008 from
5. Craig S.D., Cholson B., and Driscoll D.M. Animated pedagogical agents in multimedia educational environments: effects of agent properties, picture features and redundancy. Journal of Educational Psychology 94 2 (2002) 428-434
6. Dehn D., and van Mulken S. The impact of animated interface agents: a review of empirical research. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 52 (2000) 1-22
7. Devine P.G. Stereotypes and prejudice: their automatic and controlled components. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 56 (1989) 5-18
8. Devine P.G., and Baker S.M. Measurement of racial stereotype subtyping. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 17 1 (1991) 44-50
9. Epleya N., and Krugerb J. When what you type isn't what they read: the perseverance of stereotypes and expectancies over e-mail. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 41 (2005) 414-422
10. Gladwell M. Blink: The power of thinking without thinking (2005), Little, Brown, and Company, New York, NY
11. Gulz A. Benefits of virtual characters in computer based learning environments: claims and evidence. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education 14 (2004) 313-334
12. Gulz A., and Haake M. Design of animated pedagogical agents - a look at their look. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 64 4 (2006) 322-339
13. Haake M., and Gulz A. Visual stereotypes and virtual pedagogical agents. Educational Technology & Society 11 4 (2008) 1-15
14. Hamilton D.L., and Sherman S.J. Perceiving persons and groups. Psychological Review 103 (1996) 336-355
15. Jennings N., and Collins C. Virtual or virtually U: educational institutions in second life. International Journal of Social Sciences 2 3 (2008) 180-186
16. Lester J., Converse S., Kahler S., Barlow T., Stone B., and Bhogal R. The persona effect: affective impact of animated pedagogical agents. Proceedings of Human-Computer Interaction, Association for Computing Machinery (1997) 359-366
17. Louwerse M.M., Graesser A.C., Lu S., and Mitchell H.H. Social cues in animated conversational agents. Applied Cognitive Psychology 19 (2005) 1-12
18. Macrae C.N., Milne A.B., and Bodenhausen G.V. Stereotypes as energy-saving devices: a peek inside the cognitive toolbox. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 66 (1994) 37-47
19. Mayer R.E., Dow G.T., and Mayer S. Multimedia learning in an interactive self-explaining environment: what works in the design of agent-based microworlds?. Journal of Educational Psychology 95 4 (2003) 806-813
20. Moreno, K. N., Person, N. K., Adcock, A. B., Eck, R. N. V., Jackson, G. T., & Marineau, J. C. (2002). Etiquette and efficacy in animated pedagogical agents: the role of stereotypes. Paper presented at the AAAI symposium on personalized agents, Cape Cod, MA.
21. Moreno R., and Flowerday T. Students' choice of animated pedagogical agents in science learning: a test of the similarity-attraction hypothesis on gender and ethnicity. Contemporary Educational Psychology 31 2 (2006) 186-207
22. Moreno R., Mayer R.E., Spires H., and Lester J. The case for social agency in computer-based teaching: do students learn more deeply when they interact with animated pedagogical agents?. Cognition and Instruction 19 (2001) 177-213
23. Nass C., Moon Y., and Carney P. Are respondents polite to computers? Social desirability and direct responses to computers. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 29 5 (1999) 1093-1110
24. Nass C., Moon Y., and Green N. Are computers gender-neutral? Gender stereotypic responses to computers. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 27 10 (1997) 864-876
25. Norman D.A. How might people interact with agents. In: Bradshaw J.M. (Ed). Software agents (1997), MIT Press, Menlo Park, CA 49-56
26. Plant E., Baylor A.L., Doerr C.E., and Rosenberg-Kima R.B. Changing middle-school students' attitudes and performance regarding engineering with computer-based social models. Computers and Education 53 2 (2009) 209-215
27. Reeves B., and Nass C.I. The media equation: How people treat computers, television, and new media as real people and places (1996), Cambridge University Press/CSLI, Cambridge
28. Rickel J., and Johnson L. Task-oriented collaboration with embodied agents in virtual worlds. In: Cassell J., Sullivan J., Prevost S., and Churchill E. (Eds). Embodied conversational agents (2000), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 95-122
29. Ritts V., Patterson M., and Tubbs M. Expectations, impressions, and judgments of physically attractive students: a review. Review of Educational Research 62 4 (1992) 413-426
30. Rosenberg-Kima R., Baylor A., Plant A., and Doerr C. Interface agents as social models for female students: the effects of agent visual presence and appearance on female students' attitudes and beliefs. Computers in Human Behavior 24 6 (2008) 2741-2756
31. Sweller J. Cognitive load theory, learning difficulty and instructional design. Learning and Instruction 4 (1994) 295-312
32. Veletsianos G. Cognitive and Affective Benefits of an Animated Pedagogical Agent: considering Contextual Relevance and Aesthetics. Journal of Educational Computing Research 36 4 (2007) 373-377
33. Veletsianos G., and Miller C. Conversing with Pedagogical Agents: a Phenomenological Exploration of Interacting with Digital Entities. British Journal of Educational Technology 39 6 (2008) 969-986
34. Willis J., and Todorov A. First impressions: making up your mind after 100 ms exposure to a face. Psychological Science 17 7 (2006) 592-598