Hi, I'm Jesse!

Doctoral Candidate at the University of California, Davis

The Impact of Multi-Character Story Distribution and Gesture on Children’s Engagement

Effective storytelling relies on engagement and interaction. This work develops an automated software platform for telling stories to children and investigates the impact of two design choices on children's engagement and willingness to interact with the system: story distribution and the use of complex gesture. A storyteller condition compares stories told in a third person, narrator voice with those distributed between a narrator and first-person story characters. Basic gestures are used in all our storytellings, but, in a second factor, some are augmented with gestures that indicate conversational turn changes, references to other characters and prompt children to ask questions. An analysis of eye gaze indicates that children attend more to the story when a distributed storytelling model is used. Gesture prompts appear to encourage children to ask questions, something that children did, but at a relatively low rate. Interestingly, the children most frequently asked "why" questions. Gaze switching happened more quickly when the story characters began to speak than for narrator turns. These results have implications for future agent-based storytelling system research.

Nominated for "Best Full Length Paper" at ICIDS 2019.

Paper

Link

Experimental Stimuli Video

Link

Presentation Slides

Link

Bibtex

@InProceedings{10.1007/978-3-030-33894-7_14,
	author="Smith, Harrison Jesse
	and Riley, Brian K.
	and Reed, Lena
	and Harrison, Vrindavan
	and Walker, Marilyn
	and Neff, Michael",
	editor="Cardona-Rivera, Rogelio E.
	and Sullivan, Anne
	and Young, R. Michael",
	title="The Impact of Multi-character Story Distribution and Gesture on Children's Engagement",
	booktitle="Interactive Storytelling",
	year="2019",
	publisher="Springer International Publishing",
	address="Cham",
	pages="128--143",
	abstract="Effective storytelling relies on engagement and interaction. This work develops an automated software platform for telling stories to children and investigates the impact of two design choices on children's engagement and willingness to interact with the system: story distribution and the use of complex gesture. A storyteller condition compares stories told in a third person, narrator voice with those distributed between a narrator and first-person story characters. Basic gestures are used in all our storytellings, but, in a second factor, some are augmented with gestures that indicate conversational turn changes, references to other characters and prompt children to ask questions. An analysis of eye gaze indicates that children attend more to the story when a distributed storytelling model is used. Gesture prompts appear to encourage children to ask questions, something that children did, but at a relatively low rate. Interestingly, the children most frequently asked ``why'' questions. Gaze switching happened more quickly when the story characters began to speak than for narrator turns. These results have implications for future agent-based storytelling system research.",
	isbn="978-3-030-33894-7"
}

Acknowledgement

This work was partially supported through NSF grant IIS-1748058.

I'd like to thank Jonathan Tran and Tucker Zischka for their data annotation work.

Back to homepage