Do I need a body to encourage you? The effect of embodiment on social facilitation

Social facilitation refers to the phenomenon that the presence of others can improve one´s performance in simple tasks. This work investigates whether/how we can achieve the same effect using virtual characters. In particular, we want to study the difference among using a digital character, a cognitive robot, and a real person to achieve this effect. We also want to investigate the importance of feeling being evaluated for social facilitation to take place.