A theoretical review of the Proteus effect: understanding the underlying processes.

Humans' inherent fascination for stories can be observed throughout most of our documented history. If, for a long time, narratives were told through paintings, songs, or literature, recent technological advances such as immersive virtual reality have made it possible for us to interact with storylines and characters in a completely new manner. With these new technologies came the need to study how people interact with them and how they affect their users.

Managing an Agent's Self-Presentational Strategies During an Interaction.

In this paper we present a computational model for managing the impressions of warmth and competence (the two fundamental dimensions of social cognition) of an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) while interacting with a human. The ECA can choose among four different self-presentational strategies eliciting different impressions of warmth and/or competence in the user, through its verbal and non-verbal behavior. The choice of the non-verbal behaviors displayed by the ECA relies on our previous studies.