Knowing Me, Knowing AU: How Should We Design Agent-Mediated Mimicry?

A lack of self-awareness of communicative behaviours can lead to disadvantages in important interactions. Video recordings as a tool for self-observation have been widely adopted to initiate behaviour change and reflection. Seeing oneself in a recording can lead to negative affect. Forcing an external perspective can lead to cognitive dissonance. Avatars and virtual agents have the advantage that they can copy a human's behaviour while potentially avoiding this dissonance. To explore the design space of mimicking agents, we set up a user study where a video baseline is compared to agent-mediated conditions ranging from idle non-verbal behaviour to complete mimicry of the voice and face. We show that participants gain increased self-awareness from seeing themselves mediated through the virtual agent. We further discuss qualitative observations for the future design of systems that aid in self-reflection, and particularly note that partial mimicry seems to be less appreciated than full mimicry.