Virtual Actor with Social-Emotional Intelligence

This work continues the effort to design and test the cognitive architecture eBICA: a general model of emotionally biased behavior control and decision making, with the focus on social emotional relationships. The key building blocks of the model include dynamics of mutual appraisals of actors, bi-directionally linked to behavior, on the one hand, and on the other hand - to M-schemas, that establish normal behavior of two or more actors involved in a mutual relationship, such as partnership. To test the model, we implement a Virtual Actor embodied as an avatar in a specifically designed virtual environment, and use several paradigms of its social interaction with humans. We show that virtual environments and associated paradigms can be divided into a hierarchy, on top of which are paradigms with dynamically changing social relationships and roles. Using paradigms of this kind, we show that a virtual actor can be indistinguishable from a human participant in three dimensions: efficiency, believability and social acceptability. Some of the social measures demonstrate a higher-than-human performance, inspiring an idea of a new challenge for BICA and AI. The general model of a Virtual Actor presented here is anticipated to sparkle ideas of broad impacts on many practical areas.