Rock Your Story: Effects of Adapting Personality Behavior through Body Movement on Story Recall

In order to design social agents for long term interactions, it is important to enable them to adapt to the users. In this paper, we chose personality as a medium for adaptation. We conducted a study with 20 participants who watched a story presented by a virtual character in one of two conditions: extroverted or introverted. The study aimed at assessing the impacts of matching the personality of the user with the virtual character through body language on the likability of the character and the information recall of the story. Our findings do not appear to coincide with theoretical expectations since the extroverted character had higher ratings of likability regardless of the personality of the user. Results have also shown a marginal positive effect of the encounter with the introverted character in terms of memory recall. We discuss the important implications that these results may have in the future for human agent interaction design.