Modeling Cognitive Structure of Emotion for Developing a Pedagogical Agent Based Interactive Game

The paradigm of animated pedagogical agent has been developed in recent years. These lifelike autonomous characters inhabit leaning environments and make rich, face-to-face learning interactions possible. Children seem to develop an immediate and deep affinity to such characters: the agents abilities open up new possibilities, e.g. agents can demonstrate complex tasks, employ locomotion and gestures, focus children´s attention on the most important aspects of a task at hand, and convey emotional responses to the game. This create a comfortable environment with the ability to both engage and motivate children. The pedagogical agent uses emotion, intensity of emotion, and game states in order to create rules for adapting the system according to child behavior. Results showed that an affective gesture recognition model was able to recognize a child´s emotion with a considerably high rate of over 82.5%, and the social agent (estimate intensity of emotion) had a strong relationship with observers´ feedback, except in low intensity levels.