Social fidelity in virtual agents: Impacts on presence and learning

Teaching and training are increasingly moving from real world venues to computerized environments, with human instructors often being replaced or joined by virtual pedagogical agents. While system fidelity and immersive properties of virtual learning environments are frequently discussed in the literature, less often addressed is the fidelity of the social components of teaching and their inclusion in pedagogical agent design. Teaching is inherently a social process, making the social fidelity of virtual agents a potential factor affecting learning outcomes. In this paper, we explore the concept of social fidelity as it pertains to the teaching effectiveness of pedagogical agents. We define the term, distinguish two subcategories, and discuss representative examples of research in these domains. Promising avenues for improving learning outcomes with social fidelity include personalized language, politeness, personality, attention, feedback, social memory, and gestures. Key conclusions are that: Social fidelity is important to learning in non-social domains, tradeoffs exist when implementing certain forms of social fidelity, individual user differences need to be more widely considered, and more focused studies are needed to compare different levels of social fidelity to uncover how they impact learning outcomes. •We suggest that Social Fidelity has two divisions: Functional and Physical.•Social Fidelity may impact teaching effectiveness of pedagogical agents in non-social domains.•Tradeoffs exist when implementing some forms of Social Fidelity in pedagogical agents.•Personalized language, politeness, personality, and gestures in pedagogical agents have had positive learning impacts.