Examining Direct and Indirect Social Influence with Virtual Characters: The Role of Gender and Realism Catherine Zanbaka PhD Candidate in Computer Science University of North Carolina at Charlotte Faculty Candidate Friday, February 9^th, 2007 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. Fuller Labs 320 With the emergence of interface agents and virtual characters in everyday applications, understanding how people respond to this new medium is crucial. If social interactions with virtual humans are found to be like human to human interactions, then researchers will be able to substitute virtual humans for real people in both research and applied settings. The research presented in this talk covers three experiments which investigate how people react to and are influenced by virtual agents. To study both direct and indirect social influence, two paradigms (Social Facilitation and Inhibition, and Persuasion) from the field of social psychology were used to compare human to human with human to virtual human interactions. The overall conclusion is that people do respond similarly to virtual characters as they respond to real people. In fact, just as in real life interactions, gender plays a significant role in how people respond to virtual characters, more so than even the appearance of the virtual character. This talk presents empirical results from three experiments involving over 300 participants. ________ Catherine A. Zanbaka received a BS in computer Science in 2000 and an MS in Human Computer Interaction in 2002 from the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is currently a PhD candidate in Information Technology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her research interest includes 3D human computer interaction, virtual humans, and virtual environments. Host: Michael Gennert Refreshments will be served. Maintained by webmaster@cs.wpi.edu