Improving Active Attitude for Interactive Decision-making with Multiple Agents by Increasing Personal Resource

When human participants collaborate in decision-making and problem solving, the results are often better than those obtained from individual efforts. However, when they cooperatively perform tasks with an embodied agent, the agent is often regarded merely as a human-centric multi-modal interface from which information is obtained. In this study, by increasing the “personal resource” in the aspect of work engagement, we aim to incorporate active attitude in the human participants toward task and in their interactions with the embodied agents. We conducted an experiment to investigate whether increasing the personal resource will impact the active attitude of participants. In the experiment, we used a mediator agent that increased either the “personal resource” or “job resource” in addition to an expert agent that directly supported the task. The results suggested that a mediator agent that increased the personal resources can induce the active attitude of participants in the human-agent interaction.