de Melo Celso M, Kim Kangsoo, Norouzi Nahal, Bruder Gerd, Welch Gregory
Computational and Information Sciences, CCDC US Army Research Laboratory, Playa Vista, CA, United States.
College of Nursing, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, United States.
Front Psychol. 2020 Nov 17;11:554706. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.554706. eCollection 2020.
Recent times have seen increasing interest in conversational assistants (e.g., Amazon Alexa) designed to help users in their daily tasks. In military settings, it is critical to design assistants that are, simultaneously, helpful and able to minimize the user's cognitive load. Here, we show that embodiment plays a key role in achieving that goal. We present an experiment where participants engaged in an augmented reality version of the relatively well-known desert survival task. Participants were paired with a voice assistant, an embodied assistant, or no assistant. The assistants made suggestions verbally throughout the task, whereas the embodied assistant further used gestures and emotion to communicate with the user. Our results indicate that both assistant conditions led to higher performance over the no assistant condition, but the embodied assistant achieved this with less cognitive burden on the decision maker than the voice assistant, which is a novel contribution. We discuss implications for the design of intelligent collaborative systems for the warfighter.
近年来，人们对旨在帮助用户完成日常任务的对话式助手（如亚马逊Alexa）的兴趣与日俱增。在军事环境中，设计出既有用又能将用户认知负担降至最低的助手至关重要。在此，我们表明具身化在实现这一目标中起着关键作用。我们呈现了一项实验，参与者参与了相对知名的沙漠生存任务的增强现实版本。参与者被配对了语音助手、具身化助手或无助手。助手在整个任务过程中通过口头提出建议，而具身化助手还进一步使用手势和情感与用户交流。我们的结果表明，与无助手条件相比，两种助手条件都带来了更高的表现，但具身化助手在决策者身上产生的认知负担比语音助手更小，这是一项新颖的贡献。我们讨论了对为战士设计智能协作系统的启示。
