Brief Biography
Dr. Aguiar is the Assistant Director of Research in the Research Unit at Oregon State University Ecampus. She earned Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of Oregon and served as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Children's Digital Media Center at Georgetown University. In her independent research, she investigates children's concepts of real and imaginary others, including peers, imaginary companions, media characters, and artificially intelligent agents (e.g., virtual characters in digital games). She is also interested in children's experiences of fully immersive virtual environments, and their concepts of the characters that inhabit these spaces. Her most recent work focuses on children's parasocial relationships with media characters, including the qualities that make up these relationships, and the opportunities they afford in learning from digital media.
Current research
Do preschool age children view a stuffed dog in ways that are different than a virtual dog? In collaboration with Dr. Marjorie Taylor, young children interacted with both a stuffed dog and a virtual dog, and then were asked to make judgements about both entities. Check out our findings in the link below:
Do young children think they can be friends with an artificially intelligent virtual character? And do they view these friendships as different from the friendships they have with real people and inanimate toys? I developed a method to capture how children might think about a range of people, including a real person, a real person on a video chat program, a virtual person, and a doll. Learn more here:
Collaborative Research
At the Children's Digital Media Center at Georgetown University, I partnered with Dr. Sandra Calvert to investigate children's parasocial relationships with popular media characters (such as Elmo from Sesame Street). Our collaborative research examined changes in parent perceptions of children's parasocial relationships with media characters (Aguiar et al., 2019), as well as changes in parent perceptions of children's parasocial breakups with media characters (Aguiar et al., 2019). Our current collaborative work examines how popular media characters can enhance opportunities for early STEM learning from digital games (Aguiar et al., under review; Calvert, Putnam, Aguiar, et al., 2020).
I recently collaborated with Dr. Jeremy Bailenson and Jakki Bailey at Stanford University, examining how children's experiences in immersive virtual reality differs from more traditional screen based platforms (Bailey, Bailenson, Obradovic, & Aguiar, 2019). In this study, preschool age children played an inhibitory control game of "Simon Says" in either a fully immersive virtual environment or on a two dimensional computer screen.