The use of emotions to create believable agents in a virtual environment

In the past emotions have been dismissed as a distraction to the logical, scientific thought process. More recently however, the importance of emotion in human-like intelligence and behaviour has been identified. This project aims at exploring this aspect of Artificial Intelligence by modeling the ability to display emotions in autonomous software agents within the constraints of a virtual environment. The motivation behind this is to determine whether the behaviour of these agents will cause the human participant to interact with the agent as if interacting with other humans. We have created an Agent-Cocktail Party World for this purpose and an Avatar-Cocktail Party World for the purpose of studying the psychological phenomenon of Ostracism. Our results show that the addition of an emotionbased intelligent component was able to make a statistically significant difference to the experimental condition by creating a more realistic environment in which to simulate the Punitive Ostracism...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Karthi Selvarajah, Debbie Richards
• Keywords: ATAL 2005, Party World, Punitive Ostracism Condition, Scientific Thought Process