Effects of Virtual Human Presence on Task Performance

Do people respond to a virtual human in the same way they would to a real human? To answer this question, we designed a study which replicates a classical test of human-human social interaction. Particularly, we chose to replicate the social facilitation/social inhibition effects. Social facilitation/inhibition theory simply states that when in the presence of others, people perform learned tasks better and novel tasks worse. Participants first learned a task and were then randomly assigned to perform the same task or a novel task either alone, in the presence of a real human, or in the presence of a virtual human. Our results showed that people reacted to the virtual human similarly to the way they reacted to the real human. In particular, female participants performing in the presence of the virtual human demonstrated the social inhibition effect. We also found that more women learned the novel task when alone than when being observed by either a human or a virtual human.