Current argumentation support software often employs graphical representations of logical relationships. Little is known about the extent to which logical structuring helps to increase a user's task performance. In this research, various levels of graphical representation of the logical structure of legal subject matter are experimentally compared in terms of performance. It is shown that logical structuring significantly increases task performance, but we have found no evidence that the extensive representation of logical structure as employed by several contemporary software applications is more effective or usable than a simplified graphical representation that was previously implemented in an application called ArguGuide.

The world population is getting older and more and more people suffer from a chronic disease such as diabetes. The need for medical (self-)care therefore increases, and we think a personal (robot) assistant could help. This paper gives guidelines for self-care that supports and shows how it could be incorporated in a (embodied) personal assistant. These guidelines were derived from motivational interviewing, persuasive technology, and from existing guidelines for personal assistants. Questions this paper addresses include: Is it possible to incorporate them in a personal assistant? Can a robot have the same kind of dialogs as a text interface? A first experiment, conducted with young participants, showed that the guidelines were best expressed in a socially intelligent iCat in comparison with a nonsocially intelligent iCat, a social and nonsocially intelligent Tiggie, and a text interface. Furthermore it showed that people indeed preferred the iCat over the text interface, possibly because the iCat's social intelligence