Pointing Gestures as an External Compensatory Strategy: Mechanisms Underlying Their Role in Mitigating the Negative Effects of Virtual Teachers’ Smiling Expressions

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-597-3_56How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Virtual Teacher; Nonverbal behavior; Pointing gestures; facial expressions; Eye tracking

Abstract

While a virtual teacher’s smiling expression can convey positive emotions, its lack of realism may lead to cognitive dissonance and social discomfort. This study explores an external compensation strategy, examining the mitigating effects of indicative gestures. The experiment employed a 2 (Gesture Direction: Slide/Student) × 2 (Facial Expression: Smile/Neutral) within-subjects design with 52 college students. Results indicate that smiling expression significantly attracted learners’ visual attention to the teacher’s face, but did not significantly reduce focus on instructional content nor directly impair performance. Gesture direction exhibited clear functional differentiation: gestures pointing at slides served cognitive guidance, while those pointing at students oriented toward social interaction. When the virtual teacher displayed a smiling expression, gestures pointing at slides redirected learners’ attention from the face back to the content and enhanced intrinsic motivation. These findings suggest that achieving overall optimization through functional configuration of multiple cues is more effective than simply pursuing high realism.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Xinrui Song
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/07/13
TI  - Pointing Gestures as an External Compensatory Strategy: Mechanisms Underlying Their Role in Mitigating the Negative Effects of Virtual Teachers’ Smiling Expressions
BT  - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language and Cultural Communication (ICLCC 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 519
EP  - 525
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-597-3_56
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-597-3_56
ID  - Song2026
ER  -