Personalized Avatars Without Agentic Interaction: Do They Promote Learning Performance and Sense of Self in a Teaching Context? A Pilot Study

Abstract

Virtual agents are becoming promising opportunities for augmenting human-human interaction in the analog world in a diversity of domains such as health care or education. This experimental study explores the impact of virtual self- and virtual other presence on e-learning performance in a virtual classroom setting. In addition, the relevance of virtual teachers is explored. The classroom setting is designed to simulate to study either alone with one’s self-representative avatar or together with virtual classmates. Participants could take part in an online course thought by a virtual teacher. First results show that the mere representation of the virtual Self or of virtual Others by static avatars without any functionality of the avatars to serve as interactive agents has no differential impact on the learner’s immediate learning performance, even when the avatars representing the Self are self-chosen by the participants. However, the online course taught by a humanoid avatar as virtual teacher was positively related with the learning performance. This suggests that embodying teachers as virtual educators in online learning could help improve the learner’s cognitive performance with or without virtual presence of one’s Self or peers.