Page 63 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

46 Socially Intelligent Agents

Attitudes: A good teacher indicates pride in the student through face and
gesture (Lester et. al); a friendly nod indicates not just acceptance of an
offer for coffee but enthusiasm toward that offer (Clark).
Nonverbal cues can include gestures made with the hands and head, ex-
pressions made with the face, posture, proximity, eye contact, as well as tone,
volume, style, and duration of speech.
Nonverbal cues are routinely manipulated in human-human conversation to
achieve certain goals, some admirable, some less so (Lester et. al point out the
effectiveness of nonverbal cues in pedagogy; Cialdini notes that sales training
often includes imitation of one’s customer’s body language, which increases
that person’s feeling of similarity to the salesperson, and thus likelihood of
being convinced to buy).

1.2 Use of Nonverbal Social Cues in Interface Agents
There is experimental evidence confirming that people will also read nonver-
bal cues in agents, and that these nonverbal cues can in fact influence attitude
toward the agent, as well as the level of behavioral influence the agent may have
on the person (Isbister and Nass). Some examples of agents using nonverbal
cues include:
Deictic (content supporting) gestures in a virtual real estate agent (Bick-
more and Cassell)
Deictic and emotional gestures and facial expressions in a pedagogical
agent (Lester et. al)
Deictic, eye gaze, and turn-taking gestures in an agent meant to teach
tasks within a shared virtual context (Rickel and Johnson).
Focus in these projects has been on the support of a one-on-one interaction
with the agent.

1.3 Using Nonverbal Social Cues in Designing Interface
Agents to Support Human-Human Communication

Agents with the ability to facilitate and enhance human-human social in-
teraction could, for example, help to make connections between people with
commonalities they do not yet know about, or guide group discovery and learn-
ing, among other potential applications.
In group settings, nonverbal cues are just as crucial as they are in one-on- one
conversational settings. Thesamesortsof strategies apply, withsomeadditional
tactics related to group situations. For example, people use nonverbal cues to
indicate when they are giving up or beginning a turn in a conversation (Clark), to
welcome newcomers or ward off people who may be attempting to join a private