A study on human-agent teaming through spoken interaction: the impact of human individual traits and agent characteristics

Lara Gauder, Martin Bernardo Meza, Javier Krick, Alejandro Masin, Luciana Benotti +2

Human-agent teams are collaborative systems where humans and agents work interdependently to achieve shared goals. The success of such teams is associated with the human's perception of the agent as a legitimate teammate. This perception is thought to depend not only on the agent's capabilities and reliability but also on social factors. We explore whether simple changes in an agent's communicative behavior can influence the human's perception of the agent's teammate-likeness. To this end, we developed a protocol based on a collaborative game requiring spoken interaction, in which a human subject and a virtual agent collaborate to identify a target object and place it on a board. Each subject interacted with two agents which provided the same task-relevant information but differed in behavior. While one was a neutral tool-like agent, the other was a team-building agent that used simple social strategies such as empathy, politeness, and positivity. Our analysis shows that the team-building agent was perceived as significantly more teammate-like, even in terms of its ability, despite both agents having identical capabilities for game-solving. Further, subjects with a higher…