Job interview simulation with a virtual agents aims at improving people's social skills and supporting professional inclusion. In such simulators, the virtual agent must be capable of representing and reasoning about the user's mental state based on social cues that inform the system about his her affects and social attitude. In this paper, we propose a formal model of Theory of Mind (ToM) for virtual agent in the context of human-agent interaction that focuses on the affective dimension. It relies on a hybrid ToM that combines the two major paradigms of the domain. Our framework is based on modal logic and inference rules about the mental states, emotions and social relations of both actors. Finally, we present preliminary results regarding the impact of such a model on natural interaction in the context of job interviews simulation.
From the philosophical point of view, a debate about how ToM is processed by human adults opposes two theories. The (TT) argues for a folk-psychology reasoning, i.e. a set of rules one acquires regarding human mind functioning. @cite_5 . The (ST) @cite_27 defends a mirroring or projection process allowing for taking someone else's perspective. Various research demonstrated that neither pure TT nor pure ST were realistic @cite_23 and both theorists and simulationists turn toward more hybrid models @cite_5 @cite_27 .
@cite_5 @cite_27 @cite_23
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Abstract Human self-consciousness as the metarepresentation of ones own mental states and the so-called theory of mind (TOM) capacity, which requires the ability to model the mental states of others, are closely related higher cognitive functions. We address here the issue of whether taking the self-perspective (SELF) or modeling the mind of someone else (TOM) employ the same or differential neural mechanisms. A TOM paradigm was used and extended to include stimulus material that involved TOM and SELF capacities in a two-way factorial design. A behavioral study in 42 healthy volunteers showed that TOM and SELF induced differential states of mind: subjects assigned correctly first or third person pronouns when providing responses to the stimuli. Following the behavioral study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in eight healthy, right-handed males to study the common and differential neural mechanisms underlying TOM and SELF. The main factor TOM led to increased neural activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and left temporopolar cortex. The main factor SELF led to increased neural activity in the right temporopariet al junction and in the anterior cingulate cortex. A significant interaction of both factors TOM and SELF was observed in the right prefrontal cortex. These divergent neural activations in response to TOM and SELF suggest that these important differential mental capacities of human self-consciousness are implemented at least in part in distinct brain regions. We propose a relevance feedback system for retrieving a mental face picture from a large image database. This scenario differs from standard image retrieval since the target image exists only in the mind of the user, who responds to a sequence of machine-generated queries designed to display the person in mind as quickly as possible. At each iteration the user declares which of several displayed faces is “closest” to his target. The central limiting factor is the “semantic gap” between the standard intensity-based features which index the images in the database and the higher-level representation in the mind of the user which drives his answers. We explore a Bayesian, information-theoretic framework for choosing which images to display and for modeling the response of the user. The challenge is to account for psycho-visual factors and sources of variability in human decision-making. We present experiments with real users which illustrate and validate the proposed algorithms. This article discusses a formal belief, desire, intention (BDI)-based agent model for theory of mind (ToM). The model uses BDI concepts to describe the reasoning process of an agent that reasons about the reasoning process of another agent, which is also based on BDI concepts. We discuss three different application areas and illustrate how the model can be applied to each of them. We explore a case study for each of the application areas and apply our model to it. For each case study, a number of simulation experiments are described, and their results are discussed. Abstract In this article we propose an account of the early development of children's knowledge about the mind and report two studies designed to test a part of it. According to this “connections-representations” account, young children begin their discovery of the mental world by learning that they and other people have internal experiences or mental states that connect them cognitively to external objects and events-experiences such as seeing them, hearing them, and wanting them. Later, they realize that the same object can be seriously (other than in pretense) mentally represented in different, seemingly contradictory ways: for example, as A in appearance, B in reality, C according to their perceptual or conceptual perspective, and D according to another person's. The results of both studies confirmed the prediction that 3-year-olds would perform well on appearance-reality and perceptual perspective-taking tasks requiring only an understanding of cognitive connections, but perform poorly on tasks requiring an understanding of seemingly-contrary-to-fact mental representations. To illustrate, children of this age had little difficulty determining that they could hear but could not see a noise-making object located on the experimenter's side of a barrier, and that the experimenter could see it (connections-level tasks). In contrast, they were largely unable to say, for instance, that a toy bear held behind a large elephant mask and emitting a cat sound looked like an elephant, sounded like a cat, and really was a toy bear (representations-level tasks)—even though the experimenter had actually told them previously what it looked like, sounded like, and really was. The article concludes with speculations about the possible origins of connections and representations knowledge and observations about the significance of these acquisitions for the child's development.