TY - GEN
T1 - Supporting narrative understanding of children with autism: A story interface with autonomous autobiographic agents
AU - Ho, W.C.
AU - Davis, Megan
AU - Dautenhahn, K.
N1 - “This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder." “Copyright IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.” DOI: 10.1109/ICORR.2009.5209580
PY - 2009
Y1 - 2009
N2 - Recent studies in education for children with autism demonstrated that computer assisted learning can increase children's narrative understanding. However, software interfaces which include autonomous intelligent agents have yet to be explored in this context. In this paper we investigate how a narrative storytelling environment which is populated with virtual characters may help children with autism to understand narrative structure and to remember meaningful events within in a story. The behaviours of characters in the narrative storytelling environment are driven by a cognitive agent architecture and, in particular, a specially designed computational autobiographic memory (AM) which allows the virtual characters to remember and express emotional experiences. An application named virtual agent story interface (VASI) has been developed to visualise the agents' AMs and to help the children to reconstruct their own version of a story. In this paper we describe related research in the area, the overall design rationale of VASI, details of the VASI software design and the preliminary evaluation study.
AB - Recent studies in education for children with autism demonstrated that computer assisted learning can increase children's narrative understanding. However, software interfaces which include autonomous intelligent agents have yet to be explored in this context. In this paper we investigate how a narrative storytelling environment which is populated with virtual characters may help children with autism to understand narrative structure and to remember meaningful events within in a story. The behaviours of characters in the narrative storytelling environment are driven by a cognitive agent architecture and, in particular, a specially designed computational autobiographic memory (AM) which allows the virtual characters to remember and express emotional experiences. An application named virtual agent story interface (VASI) has been developed to visualise the agents' AMs and to help the children to reconstruct their own version of a story. In this paper we describe related research in the area, the overall design rationale of VASI, details of the VASI software design and the preliminary evaluation study.
U2 - 10.1109/ICORR.2009.5209580
DO - 10.1109/ICORR.2009.5209580
M3 - Conference contribution
SN - 978-1-4244-3789-4
SP - 905
EP - 911
BT - Procs IEEE 11th Int Conf on Rehabilitation Robotics
PB - IEEE
T2 - IEEE 11th Int Conf on Rehabilitation Robotics
Y2 - 23 June 2009 through 26 June 2009
ER -