Evaluating the affective tactics of an emotional pedagogical agent

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a quantitative (with students of a local middle school) and a qualitative evaluation (with teachers) of a lifelike and emotional pedagogical agent, called Pat. Pat has the goal of inferring students' emotions and applying affective tactics in order to adapt the learning environment. These tactics aim at motivating students and making them increase their efforts and their intrinsic motivation. Pat attempts to achieve these goals by presenting emotional animated attitudes and encouragement messages that are chosen dynamically to compose its affective tactics.

REFERENCES

• 1: C. Ames, Motivation: What teachers should know, Teachers College Record., Spring, 1990, pp. 409--421.
• 2: E. André, T. Rist and J. Muller, Employing AI Methods to Control the Behavior of Animated Interface Agents, Applied Artificial Intelligence 13 (1999), pp. 415--448.
• 3: A. Bandura, Self-efficacy, in R. Ramachaudran, ed., Encyclopedia of Human Behavior, Academic Press, New York, 1994, pp. 71--81.
• 4: Joseph Bates, The role of emotion in believable agents, Communications of the ACM, v.37 n.7, p.122-125, July 1994 [doi>10.1145/176789.176803]
• 5: E. Bocca, P. A. Jaques and R. M. Viccari, Modelagem e Implementação da Interface para Apresentação de Comportamentos Animados e Emotivos de um Agente, Renote Revista Novas Tecnologias na Educação, 1 (2003).
• 6: Winslow Burleson , Rosalind W. Picard, Gender-Specific Approaches to Developing Emotionally Intelligent Learning Companions, IEEE Intelligent Systems, v.22 n.4, p.62-69, July 2007 [doi>10.1109/MIS.2007.69]
• 7: G. Coles, Reading Lessons: The Debate over Literacy, Hill & Wang, New York, 1998.
• 8: C. Conati, Probabilistic Assessment of User's Emotions in Educational Games, Applied Artificial Intelligence, 16 (2002), pp. 555--575.
• 9: C. Elliott, J. Rickel and J. C. Lester, Lifelike Pedagogical Agents and Affective Computing: An Exploratory Synthesis, in M. Wooldridge and M. M. Veloso, eds., Artificial Intelligence Today, Springer, 1999, pp. 195--211.
• 10: D. Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, Bantam Books, New York, 1995.
• 11: C. E. Izard, Emotion Cognition relationship and human development, Emotions, cognition and behavior, Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 59--67.
• 12: Patricia Augustin Jaques , Rosa Maria Vicari, A BDI approach to infer student's emotions in an intelligent learning environment, Computers & Education, v.49 n.2, p.360-384, September, 2007 [doi>10.1016/j.compedu.2005.09.002]
• 13: James C. Lester , Sharolyn A. Converse , Susan E. Kahler , S. Todd Barlow , Brian A. Stone , Ravinder S. Bhogal, The persona effect: affective impact of animated pedagogical agents, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.359-366, March 22-27, 1997, Atlanta, Georgia, United States [doi>10.1145/258549.258797]
• 14: J. Lester, S. A. Converse, B. Stone, S. Kahler and S. T. Barlow, Animated Pedagogical Agents and Problem-Solving Effectiveness: A Large-Scale Empirical Evaluation, in A. Boulay and A. Mizoguchi, eds., World Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education, IOS Press, Kobe, Japan, 1997, pp. 23--30.
• 15: J. Lester, S. Towns and P. Fitzgerald, Achieving Affective Impact: Visual Emotive Communication in Lifelike Pedagogical Agents, International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 10 (1999), pp. 278--291.
• 16: J. Meece and W. McColskey, Improving Student Motivation, 2001.
• 17: A. Ortony, G. Clore and A. Collins, The Cognitive Structure of Emotions, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1988.
• 18: A. Paiva, I. Machado and C. Martinho, Enriching Pedagogical Agents with Emotional Behavior: the Case of Vincent, AIED Life-like Pedagogical Agents, Le Mans, 1999.
• 19: J. Piaget, Les relations entre l'intelligence et l'affectivité dans le developpement de l'enfant, in B. Rimé and K. Scherer, eds., Les Émotions, Niestlé, Paris, 1989, pp. 75--95.
• 20: Rosalind W. Picard, Affective computing, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1997
• 21: P. e. a. Pintrich, A Manual for the Use of the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire, The Reg. of the University of Michigan, 1991.
• 22: A. S. Rao and M. Georgeff, BDI Agents: from Theory to Practice, Australian AI Institute, Melbourne, 1995.
• 23: Ricardo Azambuja Silveira , Rosa Maria Vicari, Developing Distributed Intelligent Learning Environment with JADE - Java Agents for Distance Education Framework, Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems, p.105-118, June 02-07, 2002
• 24: StatSoft, Basic Statistics, 1984--2003.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Evaluation/methodology

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: User-centered design

Keywords:
affective computing, affective user modeling, animated pedagogical agents