Affective pedagogical agents and user persuasion

The use of animated pedagogical agents with emotional capabilities in an interactive learning environment has been found to have a positive impact on learners. Aristotle contended that three elements; emotion, logic, and character are crucial for successful persuasion, i.e. in winning others over to one’s way of thinking. We have designed a pedagogical agent that acts in an interactive learning environment, using Ortony’s Cognitive Structure of Emotion model and McCrae and John’s five-factor model of personality. We investigated the persuasive impact of this emotional pedagogical agent on a group of learners. The results show that while not contributing any significant performance gain in learning, the incorporation of emotion changes the way students perceive the learning process, and makes it more engaging. We also found out that there are some gender-based and individual differences in the user perception of an emotional agent, which need to be taken into account when designing a more adaptive and “intelligent” emotional pedagogical agents.