Evaluating social attitudes of a virtual tutor

Abstract

In this paper we evaluate a model of social decision-making for virtual agents. The model computes the social attitude of a virtual agent given its social role during the interaction and its social relation toward the interactant. The resulting attitude influences the agent’s social goals and therefore determines the decisions made by the agent in terms of actions and communicative intentions to accomplish. We conducted an empirical study in the context of virtual tutor-child interaction where participants evaluated the tutor’s perceived social attitude towards the child while the tutor’s social role and relation were manipulated by our model. Results showed that both role and social relation have an influence on the agent’s perceived social attitude.