"Look at Me!": Self-Interruptions as Attention Booster?

In this paper we present results of an exploratory experiment investigating the effects of a contingently self-interrupting vs non-self-interrupting virtual agent who transmits information to a human interaction partner. In the experimental condition self-interruptions of the agent were triggered by an external event whereas in the control group the agent did not react to this event. We measured the effect of the agent's self-interruptions on human attention, memory performance and subjective ratings. In this paper we discuss the results with respect to the design of incremental human-agent dialogue modeling.