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

“It has also been used in studies of how people perceive virtual agents (e.g., [3]).”

“Participants experienced what they described as a “double first impression”: an initial assessment in VR and a second, sometimes dissonant, assessment upon encountering the full embodied person [17].”

“System response latency, for instance, significantly influences perceived competence and responsiveness [6].”

“Previous research has identified warmth and competence as significant dimensions in the perception of AI agents, similarly to the perception of humans 3,28–30 .”

“Based on previous findings on the effect of anthropomorphism on perception of a mind behind the machine [10,17,29,53,54], we additionally investigated whether the effect of prolonged real-life interaction on social mindfulness was mediated by perceived anthropomorphism.”

“In [25], [26], [30], [33] (none of them dealing with robot manipulators), either a negative or a positive effect of habituation of perceived intelligence was observed, even within the same work.”

“Perceived warmth can be influenced by the target’s appearance, verbal, and nonverbal behaviors in social interactions (Bergmann et al., 2012).”

“在交流行为之外 , Bergmann 等 [4] 的工作表明 , 用户对于虚拟人的外观同样十分敏感 , 与机器人 形的虚拟人相比 , 人形虚拟人更能够令用户在第 一次和后续的长时间接触中感到更加舒适 .”

“[64] shows how the avatar’s representation infuences the overall interactions in diferent contexts while [4] shows that the appearance of an agent impacts the ratings of warmth by human subjects.”

“…Presence [1,21], Godspeed Scales [3], Satisfaction in Interaction, The Immersive Experience Questionnaire B [20], Interpersonal Similarity [33], Trust [13], Believability [6], Politeness [22], Engaging [30], Warmth [5], Working Alliance Inventory [19] and Dimensions of Mind Perception [DMP; 11].”

“A heartwarming feeling was measured by warmth-related trait adjectives such as friendly, trustworthy, kind, sincere, helpful, and warm, which were picked up from common traits of a warmth scale in previous studies [3, 6– 8].”

“Although previous research on user’s evaluation for virtual agents for long duration is spars, few works reported that subjective impressions for robots or virtual agents were modulated by the experience of interactions with them [12] [15].”

“With the data from the transcription we then calculated the time course for Billie’s listener gaze behaviour, i.e. the delay with which the agent listener followed the human speaker’s gaze towards the referents of the spoken sentences.”

“Je remercie également le président du jury, Mohamed Chetouani, ainsi que mes rapporteurs Stefan Kopp et Matthias Rauterberg, de m’avoir fait l’honneur d’accepter de siéger dans mon jury.”

“However, social perception can be manipulated through various means such as language, gestures (Bergmann et al., 2012), and appearance (Liu et al., 2022).”

“To develop the items for measuring warmth and competence, we reviewed several papers that measured these perceptions and extracted questions from [23, 33, 5].”

“In particular, race-specific ingroup favouritism has been demonstrated in several studies [2, 10, 71].”

“Warmth and competence play a pivotal role in shaping and modifying first impressions [8].”

“Naturally, since humans will use the socio-emotional qualities present in the synthetic voice as (part of) the basis for assigning the computer personality traits [4, 12], it should be possible to create a voice whose socio-emotional qualities match the abilities of the system.”

“They can even have further impacts as the relationship develops (Bergmann et al. 2012).”