Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Identifier

729

Date

2012

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Major

Psychology

Concentration

General Psychology

Committee Chair

Arthur Graesser

Committee Member

Andrew Olney

Committee Member

Mark W Conley

Abstract

The current study investigates the impact of affect, mood contagion, and linguistic alignment on learning during tutorial conversations between a human student and two artificial pedagogical agents. The study uses an Intelligent Tutoring System known as OperationARIES! to engage students in tutorial conversations with animated agents. In this investigation, 48 college students (N = 48) conversed with pedagogical agents as they displayed 3 different moods (i.e., positive, negative, and neutral) along with a control condition in a within-subjects design. Results indicate that the mood of the agent did not significantly impact student learning even though mood contagion did occur between the artificial agent and the human student. Learning was influenced by the student's self-reported arousal level and the alignment scores that reflected a shared mental representation between the human student and the artificial agents. The results suggest that arousal and linguistic alignment during the tutorial conversations may play a role in learning.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to the local University of Memphis Electronic Theses & dissertation (ETD) Repository.

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