Stay away from me: Coughing increases social distance even in a virtual environment

PLOS ONE RESEARCH ARTICLE Stay away from me: Coughing increases social distance even in a virtual environment Masahiro Shiomi ID1☯*, Atsumu Kubota1,2☯, Mitsuhiko Kimoto1☯, Takamasa Iio1,3☯, Katsunori Shimohara1,2☯ 1 Department of Agent Interaction Design Laboratory, Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International, Kyoto, Japan, 2 Faculty of Science and Engineering, Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan, 3 Faculty of Culture and Information Science, Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan ☯ These authors contributed equally to this work. * a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Shiomi M, Kubota A, Kimoto M, Iio T, Shimohara K (2022) Stay away from me: Coughing increases social distance even in a virtual environment. PLoS ONE 17(12): e0279717. https:// doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0279717 Editor: Quan Yuan, Tsinghua University, CHINA Received: August 30, 2022 Abstract This study investigated whether the coughing behaviors of virtual agents encourage infection avoidance behavior, i.e., distancing behaviors. We hypothesized that the changes in people’s lifestyles in physical environments due to COVID-19 probably influence their behaviors, even in virtual environments where no infection risk is present. We focused on different types of virtual agents because non-human agents, such as robot-like agents, cannot spread a virus by coughing. We prepared four kinds of virtual agents (human-like/robotlike and male/female) and coughing behaviors for them and experimentally measured the personal distance maintained by participants toward them. Our experiment results showed that participants chose a greater distance from coughing agents, regardless of the types, and negatively evaluated them. They also chose a greater distance from male agents than from female agents. Accepted: December 12, 2022 Published: December 28, 2022 Copyright: © 2022 Shiomi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Funding: This work was partially supported by JST Moonshot R&D Grant Number JPMJMS2011 (experiments and evaluations), and JST CREST Grant, Number JPMJCR18A1, Japan (system developments). JST Moonshot R&D provided research funding support in the form of salary for MK and MS, and JST CREST provided research funding support in the form of salary for AK and TI, but did not have any additional role in the study Introduction Understanding the perception differences between physical and virtual environments is essential for designing the behaviors of virtual agents. For example, people usually maintain a certain distance during interactions with others in physical environments, an idea called proxemics [1, 2]. Several studies investigated whether it can be applied to interactions in human-computer interaction contexts. For example, one study reported that human perception of distance does not change much between physical and virtual environments [3]. Other studies suggested that one’s preferred distance from virtual agents is affected by complex relationships among the genders of both the users and agents as well as friendliness toward them [4, 5]. These studies suggested that addressing such knowledge in physical environments is critical for designing acceptable virtual agents in virtual environments. If lifestyles in physical environments influence interaction styles in virtual environments, shouldn’t we also consider how the COVID-19 pandemic has changed lifestyles in virtual environments? Obviously, it has dramatically affected lifestyles related to such infection avoidance behaviors as social distancing, wearing a mask, cough etiquette, etc. In fact, recent studies have PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0279717 December 28, 2022 1 / 15 PLOS ONE design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Coughing increases social distance even in a virtual environment described the changes in social distancing and sociable space fueled by COVID-19 [6, 7]. Other studies reported the changes in personal spaces in post-COVID-19 situations in both physical and virtual environments, although these studies offered conflicting results: personal spaces increased even in virtual environments [8]; people share a closer distance in a virtual environment than in a physical environment [9]. Although the COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating the need for virtual agents that provide services in virtual environments to avoid the risk of infections, these contrary findings complicate the behavior design guidelines of virtual agents during this pandemic. Clarifying such guidelines based on accumulating psychological knowledge about human behaviors in a virtual environment will contribute to achieving acceptable agent behaviors. For this purpose, observing people’s reactions toward such specific behaviors (as coughing) that remind them of the virus’s spread is effective in identifying why personal distance is changing in virtual environments (Fig 1, left). If an agent’s coughing behavior does not influence people’s distancing behaviors, such a result implies that people are adopting different interaction styles in a virtual environment. On the other hand, if people simply continue to maintain distance from a coughing agent, even in a virtual environment, such phenomena also provide useful knowledge for designing guidelines for virtual agent behaviors, e.g., whether virus-spreading behaviors should be prohibited in virtual environments. Based on these considerations, we address the following research question: Research question 1 (RQ1): Do coughing virtual agents encourage social distancing behaviors? This study also focuses on the appearance of coughing virtual agents. Past studies concluded that several factors related to the appearances of virtual agents (e.g., face design, gender, numbers, and rendering approach, e.g., realistic or a toon-CG style) influence the distancing behaviors of people [10–13]. These studies concluded that the appearance of agents is one essential factor in the distancing behaviors of people in virtual environments. We believe that when the agents are not human, e.g., a humanoid robot (Fig 1, right), people’s distancing behavior will be mitigated because a coughing robot cannot spread a virus. Based on these considerations, we pose another research question: Research question 2 (RQ2): Do the types of agents in virtual environments change distancing behavior? Related works Distancing in a virtual environment People establish distance in conversational interactions in both virtual and physical environments [3]. (...truncated)