How Does Presence Affect Trust in Simulated Autonomous Agents?

Autonomous agents present important novel capabilities for a wide swath of applications like simulating interactions between humans and agents. Simulating these interactions in VR has become an important tool for evaluating the effects of agents on human behavior and performance, including human-agent trust. This position paper presents research opportunities in the use of real-world multi-modal feedback and real-world priming experiences may have on the validity of trust measurements taken from simulated human-agent interactions in VR. In addition, it presents a hypothetical experiment addressing research questions related to this topic.