Open AccessTwo is better than one: Social rewards from two agents enhance offline improvements in motor skills more than single agent
Author(s) -
Masahiro Shiomi,
S. Okumura,
Mitsuhiko Kimoto,
Takamasa Iio,
Katsunori Shimohara
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0240622
Subject(s) - praise , motor skill , psychology , social skills , computer science , cognitive psychology , human–computer interaction , social psychology , developmental psychology
Social rewards as praise from others enhance offline improvements in human motor skills. Does praise from artificial beings, e.g., computer-graphics-based agents (displayed agents) and robots (collocated agents), also enhance offline improvements in motor skills as effectively as praise from humans? This paper answers this question via two subsequent days’ experiment. We investigated the effect of the number of agents and their sense of presence toward offline improvement in motor skills because they are essential factors to change social effects and people’s behaviors in human-agent and human-robot interaction. Our 96 participants performed a finger-tapping task. Our results showed that those who received praise from two agents showed significantly better offline motor skill improvement than people who were praised by just one agent and those who received no praise. However, we identified no significant effects related to the sense of presence.