A DIMENSIONAL MODEL FOR CULTURAL BEHAVIOR IN VIRTUAL AGENTS

  • Authors:
  • Samuel Mascarenhas;Joao Dias;Rui Prada;Ana Paiva

  • Affiliations:
  • Instituto Superior Tecnico-UTL, INESC-ID, Porto Salvo TagusPark, Portugal;Instituto Superior Tecnico-UTL, INESC-ID, Porto Salvo TagusPark, Portugal;Instituto Superior Tecnico-UTL, INESC-ID, Porto Salvo TagusPark, Portugal;Instituto Superior Tecnico-UTL, INESC-ID, Porto Salvo TagusPark, Portugal

  • Venue:
  • Applied Artificial Intelligence - Intelligent Virtual Agents
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Intercultural training is becoming more important than ever before. As a result, there is a stronger need for developing more advanced educational methods. Virtual environments can provide an innovative approach in this area. Users can safely explore complicated intercultural situations by interacting with virtual agents that display human cultural behavior. However, current environments that address cultural aspects focus on explicit aspects such as gestures, spoken language, or norms. Implicit cultural manifestations, such as values, have been greatly disregarded and yet they are a fundamental aspect. This article addresses the integration of such implicit manifestations in an agent architecture, through a dimensional model based on anthropological studies. Using the implemented architecture, two different agent cultures were created. Users were asked to visualize and describe both cultures performing a short emergent story. Results confirmed that users perceived the two cultures with significant differences that were in congruence with the model used.