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Shared mental models in improvisational performance

Published: 18 June 2010 Publication History

Abstract

This paper describes the mental structures called shared mental models, which are heavily related to group problem solving and cognition, and reports how they are related to theatrical improvisation based on our empirical findings. We have conducted a series of studies on real life improvisers aimed at uncovering the underlying cognition involved in improvisation, with the end goal of having a clear understanding of how to build improvisational synthetic characters. We describe cognitive divergence, when improvisers have conflicting mental models of what is occurring on stage, and cognitive convergence, which is the process of resolving such conflicts within the performance. These findings are supported by examples from our study and are used to make conclusions about improvisational synthetic character design.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
INT3 '10: Proceedings of the Intelligent Narrative Technologies III Workshop
June 2010
128 pages
ISBN:9781450300223
DOI:10.1145/1822309
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • SASDG: Society for the Advancement of the Science of Digital Games
  • Microsoft Research: Microsoft Research

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Published: 18 June 2010

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Author Tags

  1. cognitive science
  2. improvisation
  3. intelligent agents
  4. narrative

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FDG '10
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  • Microsoft Research

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  • (2022)Investigating the Relationship Between Dialogue States and Partner Satisfaction During Co-Creative Learning TasksInternational Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education10.1007/s40593-022-00302-533:3(543-582)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2022
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