The Proteus effect describes how users of virtual environments adjust their attitudes to match stereotypes associated with their avatar's appearance. While numerous studies have demonstrated this phenomenon's reliability, its underlying processes remain poorly understood. This work investigates deindividuation's hypothesized but unproven role within the Proteus effect. Deindividuated individuals tend to follow situational norms rather than personal ones. Therefore, together with high embodiment and identification processes, deindividuation may lead to a stronger Proteus effect. We present two experimental studies. First, we demonstrated the emergence of the Proteus effect in a real-world academic context: engineering students got better scores in a statistical task when embodying Albert Einstein's avatar compared to a control one. In the second study, we tested the role of deindividuation by manipulating participants' exposure to different identity cues during the task. While we could not find a significant effect of deindividuation on the participants' performance, our results highlight an unexpected pattern, with embodiment as a negative predictor and identification as a positive predictor of performance. These results open avenues for further research on the processes involved in the Proteus effect, particularly those focused on the relation between the avatar and the nature of the task to be performed. All supplemental materials are available at https://osf.io/au3wk/.

Avatars are known to influence behaviour through their individual identity cues (Proteus effect) and through their shared identity cues (Social identity effect). The aim of this study was to investigate these two processes in a crossed design, in order to examine their interaction in the context of a brainstorming task. To activate the Proteus effect, we used creative avatars resembling inventors, and to make social identity salient, we made the avatars wear the traditional clothing of the participants’ school. The resulting factorial design included four conditions: creative avatars with or without social identity cues, and non-creative avatars with or without social identity cues. The results show that creative performance was higher with creative than non-creative avatars, but only in the absence of social identity cues. Furthermore, the presence of social identity cues increased social identification to the group, but this unexpectedly decreased creative performance. This result is discussed together with an analysis of the meaning of the social identity cues we used, which appeared to be unrelated to creativity. This discussion highlights that the effects of social identity cues on performance are complex and may be moderated by their meaning and the particular facet of social identity they make salient.

In this article the role of different categories of postures in the detection, recognition, and interpretation of emotion in contextually rich scenarios, including ironic items, is investigated. Animated scenarios are designed with 3D virtual agents in order to test 3 conditions: In the “still” condition, the narrative content was accompanied by emotional facial expressions without any body movements; in the “idle” condition, emotionally neutral body movements were introduced; and in the “congruent” condition, emotional body postures congruent with the character's facial expressions were displayed. Those conditions were examined by 27 subjects, and their impact on the viewers’ attentional and emotional processes was assessed. The results highlight the importance of the contextual information to emotion recognition and irony interpretation. It is also shown that both idle and emotional postures improve the detection of emotional expressions. Moreover, emotional postures increase the perceived intensity of emotions and the realism of the animations.

Until now, research on arrangement of verbal and non-verbal information in multimedia presentations has not considered multimodal behavior of animated agents. In this paper, we will present an experiment exploring the effects of different types of speech–gesture cooperation in agents’ behavior: redundancy (gestures duplicate pieces of information conveyed by speech), complementarity (distribution of information across speech and gestures) and a control condition in which gesture does not convey semantic information. Using a Latin-square design, these strategies were attributed to agents of different appearances to present different objects. Fifty-four male and 54 female users attended three short presentations performed by the agents, recalled the content of presentations and evaluated both the presentations and the agents. Although speech–gesture cooperation was not consciously perceived, it proved to influence users’ recall performance and subjective evaluations: redundancy increased verbal information recall, ratings of the quality of explanation, and expressiveness of agents. Redundancy also resulted in higher likeability scores for the agents and a more positive perception of their personality. Users’ gender had no influence on this set of results.

Recent advances in the specification of the multimodal behavior of Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA) have proposed a direct and deterministic one-step mapping from high-level specifications of dialog state or agent emotion onto low-level specifications of the multimodal behavior to be displayed by the agent (e.g. facial expression, gestures, vocal utterance). The difference of abstraction between these two levels of specification makes difficult the definition of such a complex mapping. In this paper we propose an intermediate level of specification based on combinations between modalities (e.g. redundancy, complementarity). We explain how such intermediate level specifications can be described using XML in the case of deictic expressions. We define algorithms for parsing such descriptions and generating the corresponding multimodal behavior of 2D cartoon-like conversational agents. Some random selection has been introduced in these algorithms in order to induce some "natural variations" in the agent's behavior. We conclude on the usefulness of this approach for the design of ECA.