Knowing versus doing: Children's social conceptions of and behaviors toward virtual reality agents

Virtual reality (VR) can blur fantasy and reality for children by replacing their physical world with artificial stimuli. This immersive technology often includes intelligent and interactive embodied agents. In this within-participant study, we investigated 5- to 9-year-old children's (N = 25) social conceptions of and behaviors toward embodied agents in VR that represented different probabilities of existence in their daily lives (i.e., a probable child, an improbable giraffe, and an impossible Muppet). Participants rated the child and the giraffe agents significantly higher as social living beings than they rated the Muppet agent. When tasked with walking up to each embodied agent, significantly more children chose to approach the giraffe agent first rather than the child and Muppet agents. However, children stood significantly closer to the child agent, and significantly more children spontaneously reached out to try to touch the Muppet agent. Finally, children expressed strong emotions (amazement, excitement, happiness, fear, worry) toward all three embodied agents, with the giraffe evoking the most positive and the Muppet the most negative emotions. These results show that types of embodied agents in VR significantly impact children's conscious and unconscious social conceptions and behaviors differently, with implications for future interventions.