Abstract
In co-eating with real people, similar food consumption was found to benefit food intake and some subjective feelings. While co-eating agents have the potential to be caregivers or companions, the discussion of meal similarity between participants and agents is lacking. In this study, to achieve better social facilitation and the sense of eating together by a co-eating agent, we focused on the effects of meal similarity on eating amount and subjective feelings. We developed co-eating agents which can eat three types of food and conducted a laboratory-based artificial co-eating experiment. The results showed that participants perceived the meal similarity and the sense of eating together to be higher when the co-eating agent eats similar virtual food. In addition, a relationship was found between food tastiness and the difference of eating amount between the conditions. We propose that creating similar foods for co-eating agents can improve the feeling of togetherness in artificial co-eating and have the potential to facilitate eating when the food is preferred.
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Wang, JY., Inoue, T. (2023). The Similarity of Virtual Meal of a Co-eating Agent Affects Human Participant. In: Takada, H., Marutschke, D.M., Alvarez, C., Inoue, T., Hayashi, Y., Hernandez-Leo, D. (eds) Collaboration Technologies and Social Computing. CollabTech 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14199. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42141-9_8
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