Supporting narrative understanding of children with autism: A story interface with autonomous autobiographic agents

W.C. Ho, Megan Davis, K. Dautenhahn

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

5 Citations (Scopus)
105 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

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.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProcs IEEE 11th Int Conf on Rehabilitation Robotics
Subtitle of host publicationICORR 2009
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Pages905-911
ISBN (Print)978-1-4244-3789-4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2009
EventIEEE 11th Int Conf on Rehabilitation Robotics - Kyoto, Japan
Duration: 23 Jun 200926 Jun 2009

Conference

ConferenceIEEE 11th Int Conf on Rehabilitation Robotics
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityKyoto
Period23/06/0926/06/09

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