People rely on shared folk-psychological theories when judging behavior. These theories guide people’s social interactions and therefore need to be taken into consideration in the design of robots and other autonomous systems expected to interact socially with people. It is, however, not yet clear to what degree the mechanisms that underlie people’s judgments of robot behavior overlap or differ from the case of human or animal behavior. To explore this issue, participants (N = 90) were exposed to images and verbal descriptions of eight different behaviors exhibited either by a person or a humanoid robot. Participants were asked to rate the intentionality, controllability and desirability of the behaviors, and to judge the plausibility of seven different types of explanations derived from a recently proposed psychological model of lay causal explanation of human behavior. Results indicate: substantially similar judgments of human and robot behavior, both in terms of (1a) ascriptions of intentionality/controllability/desirability and in terms of (1b) plausibility judgments of behavior explanations; (2a) high level of agreement in judgments of robot behavior – (2b) slightly lower but still largely similar to agreement over human behaviors; (3) systematic differences in judgments concerning the plausibility of goals and dispositions as explanations of human vs. humanoid behavior. Taken together, these results suggest that people’s intentional stance toward the robot was in this case very similar to their stance toward the human.

Abstract.Previous studies have shown that female ECAs are more likely to be abused than male agents, which may cement gender stereotypes. In the study reported in this paper a visually androgynous ECA in the form of a teachable agent in an educational math game was compared with a female and male agent. The results confirm that female agents are more prone to be verbally abused than male agents, but also show that the visually androgynous agent was less abused than the female although more than the male agent. A surprising finding was that very few students asked the visually androgynous agent whether it was a boy or a girl. These results suggest that androgyny may be a way to keep both genders represented, which is especially important in pedagogical settings, simultaneously lowering the abusive behavior and perhaps most important, loosen the connection between gender and abuse.

Previous work indicates that physical robots elicit more favorable social responses than virtual agents. These effects have been attributed to the physical embodiment. However, a recent meta-analysis by Li [1] suggests that the benefits of robots are due to physical presence rather than physical embodiment. To further explore the importance of presence we conducted a pilot study investigating the relationship between physical and social presence. The results suggest that social presence of an artificial agent is important for interaction with people, and that the extent to which it is perceived as socially present might be unaffected by whether it is physically or virtually present.

This study examines the effects of teachable agents' expressed self-efficacy on students. A total of 166 students, 10-to 11-years-old, used a teachable agent-based math game focusing on the base-ten number system. By means of data logging and questionnaires, the study compared the effects of high vs. low agent self-efficacy on the students' in-game performance, their own math self-efficacy, and their attitude towards their agent. The study further explored the effects of matching vs. mismatching between student and agent with respect to self-efficacy. Overall, students who interacted with an agent with low self-efficacy performed better than students interacting with an agent with high self-efficacy. This was especially apparent for students who had reported low self-efficacy themselves, who performed on par with students with high self-efficacy when interacting with a digital tutee with low selfefficacy. Furthermore, students with low self-efficacy significantly increased their selfefficacy in the matched condition, i.e. when instructing a teachable agent with low selfefficacy. They also increased their self-efficacy when instructing a teachable agent with high self-efficacy, but to a smaller extent and not significantly. For students with high self-efficacy, a potential corresponding effect on a self-efficacy change due to matching Int J Artif Intell Educ (2019) may be hidden behind a ceiling effect. As a preliminary conclusion, on the basis of the results of this study, we propose that teachable agents should preferably be designed to have low self-efficacy.

Abstract. The paper discusses the addition of off-task socially oriented conversational abilities to an existing "teachable agent" (TA) in an educational game in mathematics. The purpose of this extension is to affect constructs known to promote learning, such as self-efficacy and engagement as well as enhance students' experiences of interacting with the game. A comparison of students that played the game with the off-task interaction to those who played without it, shows trends that indicate that students who played the game with off-task interaction had a more positive experience of the game, and that they also learnt more, as reflected in the learning outcomes of their TAs.