Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Do students learn better from video lectures when an on-screen instructor is socially presentthat is, when students can seethe instructor’s face and eye gaze during the lecture? The present study explores how access to the instructors face andeye gaze affects students feelings of social rapport, attention to the lesson, and learning outcomes. The study comparesa video lecture about the human kidney where students either have access to the instructors face and eye gaze during thelecture or do not (i.e., the instructor does not face the camera). Students reported higher levels of engagement, directedmore eye fixations to the lecture material rather than the instructor (based on eye-tracking metrics), and performed betteron both retention and transfer posttests after viewing a video lecture with a socially present, on-screen instructor. Resultssuggest that social cues play a role in guiding academic learning from instructional video.