Animated Pedagogical Agents in Multimedia Educational Environments: Effects of Agent Properties, Picture Features, and Redundancy

Two experiments explored the integration of animated agents into multimedia environments in the context of R. E. Mayer's (2001) cognitive theory of multimedia learning. Experiment 1 was a 3 (agent properties: agent only, agent with gesture, no agent) × 3 (picture features: static picture, sudden onset, animation) design. Agent properties produced no significant effects. Both sudden onset and animation conditions facilitated performance relative to the static-picture condition. In Experiment 2, we explored the effects of printed text, spoken narration, and spoken narration with the printed text, in a multimedia environment that included an agent, to investigate effects of redundancy. The spoken-narration-only condition outperformed the other 2, with no differences between printed text and printed text with spoken narration.