Effective Pedagogical Agent Behaviour

This paper describes a small experimental study where pedagogical agents (avatars) are added to voice-over-slide learning materials. Four different agent behaviours are tested: Avatar A performs all the upper-body gestures of the lecturer; Avatar B is animated using few random gestures in order to create a natural presence, but one that is unrelated to the speech; Avatar C only performs the lecturer’s pointing gestures; finally, Avatar D performs “lecturer-like” gestures, but these are desynchronised with the speech. Preliminary results indicate that Avatar C is the most effective at facilitating learning. An agent that displays a more active behaviour, even though the behaviour is an exact representation of the lecturer’s behaviour (such as Avatar A), is distractive and does not support learning as much.