Affective Realism of Animated Films in the Development of Simulation-Based Tutoring Systems

This paper presents a study focused on comparing real actors based scenarios and animated characters based scenarios with respect to their similarity in evoking psychophysiological activity for certain events by measuring galvanic skin response (GSR). In the experiment, one group (n=11) watched the real actors’ film whereas another group (n=7) watched the animated film, which had the same story and dialogue as the real actors’ film. The results have shown that there is no significant difference in the skin conductance response (SCR) scores between the two groups; however, responses significantly differ when SCR amplitudes are taken into account. Moreover, Pearson’s correlation reported as high as over 80% correlation between the two groups’ SCRs for certain time intervals. The authors believe that this finding is of general importance for the domain of simulation-based tutoring systems in development of and decisions regarding use of animated characters based scenarios.