Implicit and Explicit Attitudes Towards Virtual Agents in Education: An Experimental Study

Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence (AI) offer interesting opportunities for education. For example, conversational pedagogical agents could assist students and possibly automatize some teaching activities. Within virtual environments, these could be presented as embodied conversational agents or virtual educational agents (VEAs), namely digital anthropomorphic figures that are guided by AI. However, to orient the implementation of such resources in education, it is useful to analyze people’s attitudes towards them, both implicit and explicit. In this exploratory study, 20 participants responded to questions about general AI tools and VEAs’ utilizability in educational contexts. Moreover, participants completed a version of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) that assessed their implicit attitudes towards virtual agents compared with human teachers. Results showed that participants had significantly more positive explicit attitudes towards the implementation of AI in general than VEAs specifically in educational contexts. While these findings suggest a potentially skeptical perception of VEAs, further research involving real-world implementations is necessary. Preliminary results can inform future design and deployment strategies for AI-supported education, while highlighting the importance of user perceptions.