Who explains it? Avoiding the feeling of third-person helpers in auditory instruction for older people

Auditory instruction is a well used method for people of all ages because of its understandability. However the additional voice has the possibility to disturb the user's learning during the instruction because it strongly implies the support of third-person helpers. This risk increases with older people because their confidence in their ability may decline compared to the younger people. The authors propose a method to anthropomorphize an instructed target (a vacuum) to decrease the feeling of a third person during instruction. The authors conducted the experiment using our method to explain features of household appliance and evaluated the relationship between recalled features and older people's internal scale. The results show that older people remembered more features by using our method, and with female participants, their internal scales increased during the training. This demonstrates that our method can decrease the third-person feeling in female participants and increase the amount learned. Our findings suggest that auditory instructions may be an effective learning method for older adults.