Perspective sharing by body-orientation matching between a user and an embodied agent

People often try to discover and solve problems by accepting others' perspectives in daily life. In computersupported environments, a user should be able to accept the perceived mental perspective of an embodied agent in the same way. In this study, mental perspective change by body-orientation correspondence between a user and an embodied agent was examined through a psychological experiment. When a participant (N=48) was solving a problem, two embodied agents, one of which always agreed with the participant's opinion, and another of which always disagreed with it, appeared face-to-face and discussed the problem in this experiment. The location of the virtual perspective of the participant depended on experimental conditions. After the problem solving, the participant evaluated each embodied agent based on his/her impression. The results of the experiment imply that the embodied agent’s mental perspective that was different from the user’s was acceptable to the user if the body orientation of the embodied agent corresponded with that of the user, although the abrupt body orientation correspondence of the user with the embodied agent can induce a negative social influence on the user. Considering the results of the experiment, how the design principle of human-agent body-orientation correspondence can be refined and applied in real situations is discussed.