Authors:
Tomoko Koda
and
Kensuke Kikuzawa
Affiliation:
Department of Information Science and Technology, Osaka Institute of Technology, Osaka, Japan
Keyword(s):
Virtual Agent, Conversational Agent, Humanoid Robot, Social Priming, Priming Effect, Social Presence, Embodiment, Robot Anxiety Scale, RAS.
Abstract:
In this study, we focus on the priming effect that would affect the social relationships among the agent, robot, and human because the opportunities to converse with robots and agents are increasing. This research investigated the effect of embodiment of the priming agent on the perception of social presence of the primed agent. The preliminary results did not support our hypothesis that "the social presence of the primed agent becomes higher when the embodied robot primes than when the virtual agent primes." However, the results indicated that there is a dichotomy in the perceived social presence between the participants' groups when we divide them according to their anxiety level toward robots. This indicates that the priming effect on the social presence of the primed agent is different depending on the embodiment of the priming agent and people's anxiety toward robots.