Modeling Behavior of Virtual Actors: A Limited Turing Test for Social-Emotional Intelligence

Abstract

This work presents the design, implementation and study of (1) a videogame-like virtual environment simulator, enabling social interaction of avatars controlled by human participants and by virtual actors; (2) a set of virtual actors with varying forms and degree of social-emotional intelligence, based on the eBICA cognitive architecture; and (3) a limited Turing test for socialemotional intelligence, involving human participants and virtual actors. The virtual environment simulator allows for various forms of emotionally-laden interaction of actors immersed in it in the form of avatars, with data collection characterizing their behavior in detail. The objective here is to compare and evaluate models of social-emotional reasoning based on the Turing test results and other objective behavioral measures, also taking into account subjective judgment of participants. One of the long-term goals is achieving human-level believability of socially-emotional virtual actors, such as non-player characters in games, personal assistants, robots, and other intelligent artifacts. Preliminary results indicate importance of social-emotional intelligence for believability, and support assumptions of the eBICA architecture.