Two is better than one: Social rewards from two agents enhance offline improvements in motor skills more than single agent

Masahiro Shiomi; Soto Okumura; Mitsuhiko Kimoto; Takamasa Iio; Katsunori Shimohara

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0240622

Two is better than one: Social rewards from two agents enhance offline improvements in motor skills more than single agent

PLoS One. 2020 Nov 4;15(11):e0240622. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0240622. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Masahiro Shiomi¹, Soto Okumura^{1

2}, Mitsuhiko Kimoto^{1

3}, Takamasa Iio^{1

4

5}, Katsunori Shimohara²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Agent Interaction Design Laboratory, Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International, Kyoto, Japan.
² Department of Information Systems Design, Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan.
³ Department of Information and Computer Science, Keio University, Kanagawa, Japan.
⁴ Social Cognitive Engineering Laboratory, University of Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan.
⁵ JST PRESTO, Japan.

Abstract

Social rewards as praise from others enhance offline improvements in human motor skills. Does praise from artificial beings, e.g., computer-graphics-based agents (displayed agents) and robots (collocated agents), also enhance offline improvements in motor skills as effectively as praise from humans? This paper answers this question via two subsequent days' experiment. We investigated the effect of the number of agents and their sense of presence toward offline improvement in motor skills because they are essential factors to change social effects and people's behaviors in human-agent and human-robot interaction. Our 96 participants performed a finger-tapping task. Our results showed that those who received praise from two agents showed significantly better offline motor skill improvement than people who were praised by just one agent and those who received no praise. However, we identified no significant effects related to the sense of presence.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Algorithms
Female
Humans
Learning / physiology*
Male
Motor Skills / physiology*
Psychomotor Performance / physiology*
Reward*
Social Behavior*
Young Adult

Grants and funding

M.S. S.O. and K.S: JST CREST Grant, Number JPMJCR18A1, Japan M.K: JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP19J01290 T.I: JST PRESTO Grant Number JPMJPR1851, Japan, and JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP18H03311.