Feminity, Masculinity and Androgyny: How Humans Perceive the Gender of Anthropomorphic Agents

In this paper we present the first experimental step of a larger study investigating the effects of agents’ gender identification on the perceived interaction quality. The purpose was to determine how test subjects judge the ‘gender’ of virtual humans. 48 test subjects rated 7 agents according to their degree of feminity, masculinity and gender ambiguity. The results showed that subjects’ gender combined with the order in which the agents were presented have a strong impact on their perceived degree of feminity, masculinity and gender ambiguity. The agents identified as having strong feminine, masculine and androgynous traits will be used in the next experimental session to represent a multimodal dialogue system for medical queries.