Human reaction to given instructions in cooperative task with embodied agents

In face-to-face communication, we can confidently communicate through our bodies. Recently, agents have widely surfaced as existences that interact with humans, and several studies have investigated the formation of social relations with such agents. This study focuses on the possibility that the impression of embodied agents and the way of interpreting information offered by them changes owing to different environments where humans and agents exist as well as the method through which instructions are given. We examined the effects of sharing an environment in two cooperative task experiments in real/virtual worlds. Our result shows that the reliability of the information provided by the agent is improved by sharing the same environment with the agent through the body. The method of giving the instructions must also correspond to the task environment.