Do I need a body to encourage you? The effect of embodiment on social facilitation

Social facilitation refers to the phenomenon that the presence of others can improve one's performance in simple tasks. This work investigates whether/how we can achieve the same effect using virtual characters. In particular, we want to study the difference among using a digital character, a cognitive robot, and a real person to achieve this effect. We also want to investigate the importance of feeling being evaluated for social facilitation to take place.