Abstract
This comment discusses work by Aylett and Paiva (2012) which describes a synthetic approach to building a virtual world inhabited by synthetic characters where the user can experience subjective culture, that is, the experience of social reality, and learn how to empathetically communicate with people in other cultures. It provides a computational theory for integrating recent findings on emotion and cultural sensitivities into an interactive drama played by interacting characters with varying personalities. The FAtiMA-PSI, the implementation of their theory, has advanced a critical step towards basing affective intelligence on a firmer ground. Future challenges include building an empathic agent on the simulated physiology level that can be recognized as an independent ego with its own personality and presence.
The more the global network penetrates into the society, the more people enjoy socialization, getting interested in knowing what other people are doing, seeking opportunities to connect with each other, and engaging in social events. The global network has significantly extended the way mankind enjoys its innate gift. Not all of these affairs of socialization have brought about satisfaction, however, for social interactions and relationships often end in disappointment or even miserable disasters. This is mainly because our society is so complicated that it is quite hard to predict outcomes. The unpredictability often arises due to the cultural differences caused by the tacit dimension embedded in the discourse.
Damasio (1994) suggested that rational decision making is supported by emotion that summarizes signals from the body and invokes the memory of any negative outcome associated with emotion. The mind not only gives the body various motor commands, but also relies on it for critical information for judgment. People want their activities to be grounded on intuition and emotion. We all know that action might otherwise lead to a bad outcome. According to the rule of thumb, we need to reexamine the logical deduction to look for the reason why the logical consequence should accompany a tacit alert.
As such, successful communication needs to affect not only the logic on the surface, but also the emotional process beneath the surface. Many people now come to believe that empathy is a critical keyword to achieve communicative success. Social decision making needs to be supported by empathy among the participants. Pentland (2008) suggests that we need to listen to honest signals, such as influence, mimicry, activity, or consistency, that come from our brain structure and physiology. Research is uncovering the neurophysiological mechanisms by which the dynamics of our embodiment and neural system, including mirror neurons that are running automatically beneath the conscious level, might underpin intentional attunement, or embodied simulation and interpersonal relations, as suggested by Gallese, Eagle, and Migone (2007).
Aylett and Paiva (2012) provide a computational theory for integrating these exciting findings on emotion and cultural sensitivities into an interactive drama played by interacting characters with varying personalities in a given cultural background. It allows the user to experience with the first-person view of a specified character. Definitely, it is an excellent pedagogical tool for teaching how other people, such as a victim, may feel in, for example, a bullying situation.
The Ortony–Clore–Collins (OCC) model is used as cognitive appraisal: a set of symbolically encoded rules in software linking an event in the virtual world and the current goals of the synthetic character to a general affective rule (Ortony, Clore, & Collins, 1988). FAtiMA is a generic architecture that allows virtual characters to interact with each other in a given setting, by combining the cognitive appraisal and reactive and planned coping behaviors. FearNot! is an antibullying application using the FAtiMA model. Provided that the theory of mirror neurons (Iacoboni, 2008) is correct, FearNot! is an innovative tool for empathetically communicating what bullying really means as one’s quasi-experience.
FAtiMA-PSI extends FAtiMA with PSI that integrates cognition, emotion, and motivation for human action regulation and links to planning. FAtiMA-PSI includes a mechanism to model other agents and their relationship to the individual agent, which is able to build and update a record of the motivational state of other agents according to events perceived. ORIENT is an intelligent graphical-character-based system designed to enhance intercultural empathy. Symbols, rituals, and appraisal are used to represent cultural aspects in FAtiMA-PSI. Subjective culture, the experience of social reality, is formed by the social institutions. A dimensional theory of culture developed by Hofstede (2001) is used, which characterizes a culture as a set of patterns in values, rituals, heroes, and symbols. ORIENT serves as an excellent tool for researchers to configure controlled experimental settings with arbitrary parameter settings in a culture/personality model.
Aylett and Paiva (2012) have both opened up a literally wonderful and adventurous road towards the higher dimensions of communication, and vividly presented the first clear step towards in-depth understanding of communication. For example, the framework is directly applicable to designing the behavioral and cognitive model for autonomous characters in our Simulated Crowd project, 1 a novel tool for allowing people to practice culture-specific nonverbal communication behaviors (Thovuttikul et al., 2011).
Aylett and Paiva (2012) permit us to think about the next challenges, both in the short and long term. The most challenging short-term goal might be scaling-up and establishment of techniques for empirical validation. Experimental researchers would like to obtain an effective tool for research for setting up experiment scenarios for testing working hypotheses to validate, carrying out a large-scale experiment, and collecting data for analysis. The long-term challenges, on the other hand, consist of a long list: derivation of working hypotheses for neurophysiology, recognition of irony and joke, realization of emphatic agents in a wide range of application contexts, to name just a few.
Among others, an interesting challenge is to build empathic agents on the simulated physiology level. Affect could be modelled using a probabilistic rule-based approach to build a logic of the appraisal on the surface. Although data-mining techniques enable us to empirically build a parameterized model based on data obtained from observation from the outside, it is quite limited, for a sophisticated model might not be obtained unless we impose strong constraints on the internal structure. The FAtiMA-PSI by Aylett and Paiva (2012) has advanced a critical step beyond it, striving for basing affective intelligence on a firmer ground. An open issue is how much further we can advance the step if we introduce embodiment by using a body simulator that can mimic bodily feedback at the physiological level.
Another interesting challenge is to go beyond synthetic culture (Hofstede, Hofstede, & Pedersen, 2002) that allows for building an artificial environment habited by synthetic agents behaving according to a parameterized norm. Although synthetic culture is a very promising methodology for investigating cultural aspects in communication, it relies on the power of the story underlying the discourse in which the participants are asked to engage. In our living space, in contrast, participants need to build, share, and maintain the story. It is quite challenging to build an empathic agent that can be recognized as an independent ego with its own personality and presence in our living space.