Moody Agents: Affect and Discourse During Learning in a Serious Game

• Published in: Artificial Intelligence in Education Vol. 9112; pp. 135 - 144
• Main Authors: Forsyth, Carol M., Graesser, Arthur, Olney, Andrew M., Millis, Keith, Walker, Breya, Cai, Zhiqiang
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2015; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Artificial intelligence; Discourse; Educational equipment & technology, computer-aided learning (CAL); Emotion; Intelligent tutoring systems; Learning; Serious game; User interface design & usability
• ISBN: 331919772X; 9783319197722
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-19773-9_14

The current study investigated teacher emotions, student emotions, and discourse features in relation to learning in a serious game. The experiment consisted of 48 subjects participating in a 4-condition within-subjects counter-balanced pretest-interaction-posttest design. Participants interacted with a serious game teaching research methodology with natural language conversations between the human student and two artificial pedagogical agents. The discourse of the artificial pedagogical agents was manipulated to evoke student affective states. Student emotion was measured via affect grids and discourse features were measured with computational linguistics techniques. Results indicated that learner’s arousal levels impacted learning and that language use is correlated with learning.