Social and Visual Style in Virtual Pedagogical Agents

The paper addresses aspects of virtual pedagogical agents’ visual style (realism – iconization) in relation to their social style (task oriented – relation oriented). Two studies are presented that investigate which visual and social styles users prefer and how they articulate their preferences. The first study involved 42 university students; the second study involved 90 elementary school children. Special emphasis was put upon two hypotheses, grounded in cognitive theory: (i) iconized visualization may be better suited for representing a relation oriented, subjective agent – and therefore preferred by users who prefer a relation oriented agent; (ii) realistic visualization may be better suited for representing a task oriented, objective agent – and therefore preferred by users who prefer a task oriented agent. The results of the two studies provide some support to these hypotheses. Cognitive theories are exploited to interpret the results, and possible design considerations are discussed.