"Whom would you like to talk with?"

A systematic survey on embodied cognition: 11 years of research in child–computer interaction

“…In one of the studies, 'Whom would you like to talk with?' [106] which compared children's perspective of different levels of embodied peers during the creation process, the authors found that there was no influence on children's creative outcome; however, the use of more embodied agents made the process of creating more engaging. One thing to note in carrying out these comparative experiments is ensuring the embodied, and disembodied agents have similar and comparable affordances, though in some experiments like Pleo (PhyPleo and ViPleo) [79] the presentations of those affordances may differ.…”

Conversational Agents in Therapeutic Interventions for Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Survey

“…Three studies (12%) employed animal-shaped conversational agents. Soleiman et al [78] used the Squawkers McCaw robot shaped as a parrot from Hasbro Toy Company, Spitale et al [80] used an avatar and the Bluetooth Buddy Speaker Lamb robot by iLive shaped as a sheep, and Pop et al [64] used the Probo robot that is shaped as an imaginary animal with elephant-like features. Only one study (4%) employed a flower-shaped conversational agent, namely the socially assistive robot Daisy.…”

“…In one study, participants had to listen to a story and then answer questions to check their level of comprehension [64]. Twice, participants were required to retell a story [80,82]. In eight studies, they had to mimic some body movements or words or sounds produced by the conversational agent [3,9,12,15,24,76,77,80].…”

“…Twice, participants were required to retell a story [80,82]. In eight studies, they had to mimic some body movements or words or sounds produced by the conversational agent [3,9,12,15,24,76,77,80]. In two studies, participants were asked to associate visual stimuli with sounds, or words with concepts [15,16].…”

“…Findings indicated that using the socially assistive robot to implement social story intervention was more effective for improving the independence of expressing social abilities for the participants. Similarly, Spitale et al [80] employed both an embodied conversational agent and a socially assistive robot with an sheep shape and compared the two agents with humans in a within-subject study in the context of a speech-language therapeutic intervention. They involved 14 typically developed children and 3 children with language disorders.…”