Personality and Believability

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Personality and Believability

• Panel at the2nd Workshop on Intelligent Virtual
  Agents(Virtual Agents 99)
• The Centre for Virtual Environments
• University of Salford, Salford, United Kingdom
• 13th September 1999

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Believability tradeoffsBALANCE

• What is elicited from user vs.system
  capabilities
• Can go wrong both ways!
• System raises too high/complex/ expectations in
  users
• Systems places to high demands on users in terms
  of competence/ duration of interaction/...

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Believability tradeoffsEXPRESSIVITY

• Action expression problem(Phoebe Sengers)
• Convey a summary of the story behind a given
  situation, provide clues about ongoing task
• E.g.local expressive behaviour by itself is
  insufficient for discrimination of current
  emotional state!(cf. action tendencies, Nico
  Frijda)

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Believability tradeoffsBELIEVABILITY vs.
FIDELITY

• Impact of prior knowledge,folk theories,
  prejudices, on subjective assessment of system
  performance
• Emphasis on believability allows better
  exploitation of available resources
• Emphasis on fidelity (usually) results in higher
  robustness and better consistency (see next
  slides)

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Believability tradeoffsROBUSTNESS

• Brittle depth vs. Robust shallowness
• Depth (may be) required for interestingness
• Lessons from knowledge-based systems design
• Semantic vs. Architectonic Space (Nancy Kaplan)
• Capitalize on ambiguities/under-determination
• Leave space for multiple interpretation by users
• Symmetric requirements for system
• Ability to make multiple/different
  interpretations/appraisals
• Meta-reasoning

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Believability tradeoffsCONSISTENCY

• Consistent behaviour over time entails
  predictability and facilitatesrecognition of
  personality traits
• E.g. consistency of problem solving and action
  selection across different situations
  (difficult!?)
• May be achieved via aninverse mapping of
  dimensions of consistency to system lifeworld/
  architecture
• Big 3 (5) traits, action tendencies

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Believability tradeoffsPERSISTENCE

• Persisting consequences of choices, actions,
  events
• No undo

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SOCIA(L A)BILITIY

• Basic requirement for interactivity
• integration of systemuser into a bigger whole
  interactive system
• How?
• E.g. via social psychology models, such as
• PowerStatus (T. Kemper)
• Emotional Competence (C. Saarni)
• Seizure/relinquishment of control at different
  levels
• Acceptance of broad classes of inputs(recognition
  of affordances)
• (difficult/unusual for system designers)