Non-Verbal Cues (NVCs) add to communication effectiveness among individuals in both real and virtual world. Thus, NVCs transference between the two receives increased attention from both the industry and research community. Their efforts lead to sophisticated technological solutions which allow high fidelity NVCs to be transferred from real…

Constructing causal mechanistic explanations of observable phenomena is a key science practice that is often challenging for students as most mechanisms involve interactions of unobservable entities and activities. In this study, we examined how gesturing with a computer simulation that depicts the molecular mechanism of thermal conduction…

Technology-mediated simulations of teaching practice are becoming a more common way to introduce teachers to the dilemmas of teaching during professional development. In this paper, we show that the inclusion of markers of student emotions in cartoon-based scenarios of teaching changes teachers' appropriateness rating of the actions that the…

Abundant prior research has compared effects of physical and virtual manipulatives on students' conceptual learning. However, most prior research has been based on conceptual salience theory; that is, it has explained mode effects by the manipulative's capability to draw students' attention to conceptually relevant (visual or haptic) features.…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are characterized by deficits in social communication, partly attributed to the inability to pick up cues from social partners using joint attention (JA) skill. These deficits have cascading adverse effects on language acquisition and the development of cognitive skills. Therapist-mediated JA…

The training of tactical decision making increasingly occurs through serious computer games. A challenging aspect of designing such games is the modelling of human emotions. Two studies were performed to investigate the relation between fidelity and human emotion recognition in virtual human characters. Study 1 compared five versions of a virtual…

Three-dimensional (3-D) multi-user virtual environments (3-D MUVEs) have been used to provide language learners with realistic scenarios in which verbal and non-verbal interactions are simulated. However, little is known of the underlying factors that shape interaction in avatar-based virtual worlds. This study examined the perceptions of 38…

Asperger's patients have been treated by role-playing with real-life therapists. The virtual-reality town at the medical center is a new twist. The University of Texas at Dallas uses a platform from Second Life, the popular virtual world, in which patients go to an "island" customized for therapeutic purposes. The island was built by…

This paper examines the effective deployment of conversational agents in virtual worlds from the perspective of researchers/practitioners in cognitive psychology, computing science, learning technologies and engineering. From a cognitive perspective, the major challenge lies in the coordination and management of the various channels of information…