Influence of Animal-Agent Appearance on Pro-Environmental Behavior and Targeted Attention in Young Adults

Immersive technologies offer significant potential for communicating environmental issues, often employing virtual agents to guide users and structure interaction. In conservation-oriented applications, animal agents, particularly flagship species, are assumed to foster empathy and prosocial engagement. We report a between-subjects VR study in which young adults interacted with an educational application about Caribbean manatees, accompanied by either a realistic animal agent, a cartoon-style agent, or no agent. Targeted attention and short-term behavioral responses were assessed using trivia performance and voluntary donation behavior. Results show that visual appearance alone did not affect donation behavior or trivia performance under brief exposure. However, agent presence, independent of style, improved perceived perspicuity and efficiency. These findings suggest that in short educational XR sessions, animal agents primarily support cognitive structuring rather than persuasion, with implications for XR design and the interpretation of null results.