The main goal in this study was to investigate the influence of social agents in a virtual learning environment on learning motiva- tion and performance. Importantly, we demonstrated that the agent’s characteristics are critical for the influence on motivation. Namely, there was no difference between the two agents and no- agent condition, but we found a medium-sized effect on learner’s interest in the subject for the female agent in comparison to the male agent and a trend to a positive effect on performance of the older male agent. As mentioned before, due to the similarity of the female agent to the learners, a boost of motivation by the female agent was to be expected while the trend to a better outcome in the Edgar group was surprising. Possibly, Edgar was perceived more like an expert (as he was actually perceived as ‘‘more credible’’) and therefore slightly influenced performance, but not as much as the carefully designed expert agents from the study in Baylor and Kim (2005). We are therefore carful interpret- ing this trend effect, but there is a recent study showing that trust- worthiness of agents affects trust development and in turn may enhance the learning effect (Morrison, Cegielski, & Rainer, 2012). All in all however, our results neither support previous findings of Baylor and Kim (2003) who did not report any effects for interest or performance nor the results of a study by Kim, Baylor, and Shen (2007) reporting significant but very small effects (g2 = 0.11) of male agents for both aspects: interest and performance. In fact, according to our study, performance of the students was indepen- dent of the presence of any agent. Only the male agent slightly out- performed the female one. It is possible that this is an artifact of our mainly female sample, as Cortright, Lujan, Blumberg, Cox, and DiCarlo (2013) showed that an increase in intrinsic motivation only increases performance of males and not females which would explain why the positive motivating effect of Minnie did not also influence performance. The above mentioned similar studies had used equally balanced samples in terms of gender. Furthermore, our agents did not use any spoken language which makes the results hardly comparably to e.g. Kim et al. (2007) whose agents used voices. Future research could be conducted using more life- like agents. We admit that our study could have benefitted from a more realistic appearance of the agents. Nevertheless we consid- er our agents suitable for the present study with undergraduates as the students rated Minnie as feminine and attractive in our pilot study2 while according to the API rating Edgar was perceived as comparatively credible.3 However we also concede that higher rat- ings for Edgar’s credibility would have upgraded our study. This study only measures two motivational aspects, enjoyment and