September 2007
Intermediate to advanced
496 pages
10h 53m
English
Recent research summarized by Reeves and Nass (1996) shows that, under the right circumstances, people "treat computers like real people." Part of treating computers like real people is to try harder to understand their communications. Consistent with this view, Mayer, Sobko, and Mautone (2003) found that people learned better from a narrated animation on lightning formation when the speaker's voice was human rather than machine-simulated, with an effect size of .79. More recently, Atkinson, Mayer, and Merrill (2005) presented online mathematics lessons in which an on-screen agent named Peedy the parakeet explained the steps in solving various problems. Across two experiments, students performed ...
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