Who Explains It? Avoiding the Feeling of Third-Person
Helpers in Auditory Instruction for Older People
Hirotaka Osawa

Jarrod Orszulak

Kathryn M. Godfrey

Japan Science and Technology Agency
Kawaguchi Center Building
4-1-8, Honcho, Kawaguchi-shi,
Saitama 332-0012 Japan+81-48-226-5601

Massachusetts Instituteof Technology
Cambridge, MA 02142, USA

Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology
Cambridge, MA 02142, USA

ja19248@mit.edu

kgodfrey@mit.edu

osawa@nii.ac.jp
Seiji Yamada

Joseph F. Coughlin

National Institute of Informatics
2-1-2 Hitotsubashi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo
101-8430, Japan

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Cambridge, MA 02142, USA

coughlin@mit.edu

seiji@nii.ac.jp
ABSTRACT

1. INTRODUCTION

Auditory instruction is a well used method for people of all ages
because of its understandability. However the additional voice has
the possibility to disturb the user's learning during the instruction
because it strongly implies the support of third-person helpers.
This risk increases with older people because their confidence intheir ability may decline compared to the younger people. Theauthors propose a method to anthropomorphize an instructed
target (a vacuum) to decrease the feeling of a third person duringinstruction. The authors conducted the experiment using ourmethod to explain features of household appliance and evaluatedthe relationship between recalled features and older people's
internal scale. The results show that older people remembered
more features by using our method, and with female participants,
their internal scales increased during the training. This
demonstrates that our method can decrease the third-person
feeling in female participants and increase the amount learned.
Our findings suggest that auditory instructions may be aneffective learning method for older adults.

In our method, we try to decrease the feeling of a third person in
the instruction by making the target (the product which the userneeds to become familiar with) an explainer using a human-likeappearance. Our approach minimizes the feeling that a thirdperson is supporting the learning process [1]; which decreases therisk that older people will have a negative experience whilelearning. If a home appliance acquires a human-like appearance,
the user is able to understand that the voice is coming from theappliance itself. If the home appliance provides some signs toindicate that the appliance itself is speaking, the feeling of a third
person will be reduced.

2. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was supported in part by Grant in Aid for theGlobal Center of Excellence Program for "Center for Education
and Research of Symbiotic, Sage and Secure System Design from
the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sport, and Technology inJapan." The first author is supported by PRESTO JST.

Categories and Subject Descriptors

3. REFERENCES

H.5.2 [Information Interface and Presentation]: User
Interfaces-Interaction style[1] Osawa, H., Ohmura, R., and Imai, M. “Using Attachable
Humanoid Parts for Realizing Imaginary Intention and Body
Image,” International Journal of Social Robotics (2009), Vol.
1 No. 1, pp. 109–123.

General Terms: DesignKeywords
Anthropomorphization, Human-Robot Interaction, Human-AgentInteraction, Human Interface

Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).
HRI'11, March 6-9, 2011, Lausanne, Switzerland.
ACM 978-1-4503-0561-7/11/03.

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