Identification of agency through virtual embodied interaction

Abstract

To examine the identification of "social actors," we created an experimental environment to observe how people interpret the behavior of others. Our experimental environment, which physically provided interaction between a human and a computer, was a media system that connected two sides of the experimental environment to a computer network. In our experiment task, participants used our system to determine whether the other party was a human or a computer. In this study, we regard the attribution of agency toward the behaviors of others as a sign of agency identification. Our experiment results suggest that the human identification of "social actors" is induced by the interaction between the target entity and the subjects. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.