Abstract
Research shows that emotions play an important role in learning. Human tutors are capable of identifying and responding to the affective states of their students; therefore, for ITSs to be truly affective, they should also be capable of tracking and appropriately responding to the emotional state of their users. We report on a project aimed at developing an affect-aware pedagogical agent persona for an ITS for teaching database design skills. We use the dimensional approach to affective modeling, and track the users’ affective state along the valence dimension as identified from tracking the users’ facial features. We describe the facial-feature tracking application we developed, as well as the set of rules that control the agent’s behavior. The agent’s response to the student’s action depends on the student’s cognitive state (as determined from the session history) as well as on the student’s affective state. The experimental study of the agent shows the general preference towards the affective agent over the non-affective agent.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Kort, B., Reilly, R.: An Affective Module for an Intelligent Tutoring System. In: Cerri, S.A., Gouardéres, G., Paraguaçu, F. (eds.) ITS 2002. LNCS, vol. 2363, pp. 955–962. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Bloom, B.S.: The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Method of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring. Educational Researcher 13, 4–16 (1984)
Bickmore, T.W.: Unspoken Rules of Spoken Interaction. Communications of the ACM 47, 38–44 (2004)
Mishra, P., Hershey, K.A.: Etiquette and the Design of Educational Technology. Communications of the ACM 47, 45–49 (2004)
Klein, J., Moon, Y., Picard, R.W.: This Computer Responds to User Frustration: Theory, Design, and Results. Interacting with Computers 14, 119–140 (2002)
Zakharov, K., Mitrović, A., Ohlsson, S.: Feedback Micro-engineering in EER-Tutor. In: Proc. AIED 2005, pp. 718–725 (2005)
Goleman, D.: Emotional Intelligence. Bantam Books, New York (1995)
D’Mello, S., Picard, R., Graesser, A.: Toward an Affect-Sensitive AutoTutor. IEEE Intelligent Systems 22, 53–61 (2007)
Csikzentmihalyi, M.: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. HarperPerennial, New York (1990)
Myers, D.G.: Psychology. Worth Publishers, New York (1998)
Burleson, W., Picard, R.W.: Gender-Specific Approaches to Developing Emotionally Intelligent Learning Companions. IEEE Intelligent Systems 22, 62–69 (2007)
Plutchik, R.: Emotions: A Psychoevolutionary Synthesis. Harper and Row, New York (1980)
Bradley, M.M., Lang, P.J.: Measuring Emotion: Behavior, Feeling and Physiology. In: Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion, pp. 242–276. Oxford University Press, New York (2000)
Ekman, P., Friesen, W.V.: Facial Action Coding System. Consulting Psychologists Press (1978)
Tian, Y.-L., Kanade, T., Cohn, J.: Recognizing Action Units for Facial Expression Analysis. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 23, 97–115 (2001)
Pandzic, I.S., Forchheimer, R.: MPEG-4 Facial Animation: The Standard, Implementation and Applications. John Wiley and Sons (2002)
Nass, C., Brave, S.: Wired for Speech: How Voice Activates and Advances the Human-Computer Relationship. The MIT Press (2005)
Kay, J.: Learner Control. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction 11, 111–127 (2001)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Zakharov, K., Mitrovic, A., Johnston, L. (2008). Towards Emotionally-Intelligent Pedagogical Agents. In: Woolf, B.P., Aïmeur, E., Nkambou, R., Lajoie, S. (eds) Intelligent Tutoring Systems. ITS 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5091. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69132-7_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69132-7_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-69130-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-69132-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)