Abstract Teaching and training are increasingly moving from real world venues to computerized environments, with human instructors often being replaced or joined by virtual pedagogical agents. While system fidelity and immersive properties of virtual learning environments are frequently discussed in the literature, less often addressed is the fidelity of the social components of teaching and their inclusion in pedagogical agent design. Teaching is inherently a social process, making the social fidelity of virtual agents a potential factor affecting learning outcomes. In this paper, we explore the concept of social fidelity as it pertains to the teaching effectiveness of pedagogical agents. We define the term, distinguish two subcategories, and discuss representative examples of research in these domains. Promising avenues for improving learning outcomes with social fidelity include personalized language, politeness, personality, attention, feedback, social memory, and gestures. Key conclusions are that: Social fidelity is important to learning in non-social domains, tradeoffs exist when implementing certain forms of social fidelity, individual user differences need to be more widely considered, and more focused studies are needed to compare different levels of social fidelity to uncover how they impact learning outcomes.

中文翻译：

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虚拟代理的社会保真度：对存在和学习的影响

摘要 教学和培训越来越多地从现实世界的场所转移到计算机化环境，人类教师经常被虚拟教学代理取代或加入。虽然文献中经常讨论虚拟学习环境的系统保真度和沉浸式特性，但较少提及的是教学的社会组成部分的保真度及其在教学代理设计中的包含。教学本质上是一个社会过程，使虚拟代理的社会保真度成为影响学习成果的潜在因素。在本文中，我们探讨了社会忠诚度的概念，因为它与教学代理的教学效果有关。我们定义了这个术语，区分了两个子类别，并讨论了这些领域研究的代表性例子。提高社会忠诚度的学习成果的有希望的途径包括个性化语言、礼貌、个性、注意力、反馈、社会记忆和手势。主要结论是：社会忠诚度对于非社会领域的学习很重要，在实施某些形式的社会忠诚度时存在权衡，需要更广泛地考虑个体用户差异，需要更集中的研究来比较不同水平的社会忠诚度揭示它们如何影响学习成果。