Virtual Agent Design for Social Skills
Training Considering Autistic Traits
Hiroki Tanaka, Satoshi Nakamura
Nara Institute of Science and Technology, JapanEMBC 2021

12021/10/1

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Automated social skills training
Social skills training by virtual agents [Tanaka+, IUI 2015] for autism spectrum [Tanaka+, Plos one 2017]
Training effects on self-efficacy [Tanaka+, OJEMB 2021]
Hello. I'm tapas. What is yourname?
Hello, hundred's. How haveyou been recently?
Was that so, today we willlearn speaking skills together.
Why do you think speaking
skills are important?
...
Let's do role-playing.
Tell me your recent fun story.
Then please.
Yes, this is all right. Thank youvery much.
We will calculate the result, soplease wait.
Now for feedback.
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BackgroundFor virtual agent design, what kind of virtual agents are more favored or more
accepted has not been investigated
For automatic SST to be adapted and accepted by the individual, a detailed
investigation is necessary

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2021/10/1Prior studies: agents acceptability
Effects on appearance, behavior, realism, and task seriousness

Esposito et al., 2019

McDonnell et al., 2012
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Ring et al., 2014
2021/10/1

The purpose of this research1) To investigate virtual agent design in terms of automated SST
2) To investigate the relationship between likeability and an individual’s characteristics(e.g., gender, age, autistic traits)
We prepared various virtual agent designs for training social skills and evaluated theiracceptability, likeability, realism, familiarity, etc

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Question items used in our study
Acceptability as a social skills trainer
Acceptability as a listener
Realism
Familiarity
Trustworthiness
Eeriness
Likeability of the face, eyes, perceived ages, voice, clothes, and overall
Ratings by 5-point Likert scale (1: I don’t think so at all, 5: I think so very much)
Compared by the Kruskal-Wallis test and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test

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Participants profile

80
7060
5040

rho=0.67***30

Toronto Alexithymia Scalehigh alexithymia

Crowd workers (total n=913、Crowdworkers)

050

100

150

Social Responsiveness Scalehigh autistic trait
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Acceptability
Acceptability as a Trainer

12

3

4

5

Utterance: “Hello, let’s practice communication together”

Ranking

Mean
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(a)

(b)

(c)

4

1 2 5 9 6 7 8 3
3.41
2.99
(p<0.05, Wilcoxon signed-rank test)
2021/10/1(d) (e) (f)Character(g)

(h)

(i)

Ratings of images

p<0.05, comparison of all images(Kruskal-Wallis test)
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Ratings of movies

p<0.0510

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Autistic traits and likeability
Difference between the SRS levels (cut-off: 81) for character (g)(g)

p<0.0511

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Summary
Our participants liked an anime-type female character
The group with a high autistic trait showed a high rating for realistic virtual agent
Future work includes:◦ Cultural difference (eeriness)◦ Applying to other domains such as cognitive behavioral therapy

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