Computer-supported assessment tools can bring significant benefits to both students and teachers. When integrated in traditional education workflows, they may help to reduce the time required to perform the evaluation and consolidate the perception of fairness of the overall process. When integrated within on-line intelligent tutoring systems,…

Little is known about whether stereotypes influence social judgments of autistic individuals, in particular when they compete with tacit face-to-face cues. We compared impression formation of 17 subjects with high-functioning autism (HFA) and 17 age-, gender- and IQ-matched controls. Information about the profession of a job applicant served as…

Humans have an evolved embodied cognition that equips them to deal easily with the natural movements of object manipulations. Hence, learning a manipulative task is generally more effective when watching animations that show natural motions of the task, rather than equivalent static pictures. The present study was completed to explore this…

To examine the visual attention, emotional responses, learning, perceptions and attitudes of learners interacting with an animated pedagogical agent, this study compared a multimedia learning environment with an emotionally-expressive animated pedagogical agent, with a non-expressive animated pedagogical agent, and without an agent. Visual…

Animated pedagogical agents with characteristics such as facial expressions, gestures, and human emotions, under an interactive user interface are attractive to students and have high potential to promote students' learning. This study proposes a convenient method to add an embodied empathic avatar into a computer-aided learning program; learners…

The paper presents a theoretical framework addressing three aspects of embodied pedagogical agents: visual static appearance, pedagogical role, and communicative style. The framework is then applied to a user study where 90 school children (aged 12-15) in a dummy multimedia program were presented with either an instructor or a learning companion…

This paper describes two empirical studies which investigated the importance for spatial learning of view control and object manipulation within 3D environments. A 3D virtual chemistry laboratory was used as the research instrument. Subjects, who were university undergraduate students (34 in the first study and 80 in the second study), undertook…