We examined the influence of groups of agents and the type of avatar on movement interference. In addition, we studied the synchronization of the subject with the agent. For that, we conducted experiments utilizing human subjects to examine the influence of one, two, or three agents, as well as human or robot avatars, and finally, the agent moving biologically or linearly. We found the main effect on movement interference was the number of agents; namely, three agents had significantly more influence on movement interference than one agent. These results suggest that the number of agents is more influential on movement interference than other avatar characteristics. For the synchronization, the main effect of the type of the agent was revealed, showing that the human agent kept more synchronization compared to the robotic agent. In this experiment, we introduced an additional paradigm on the interference which we called synchronization, discovering that a group of agents is able to influence this behavioral level as well.
Keywords: human–agent interaction; human–robot interaction; interference; synchronization; virtual agent.