Page 157 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

140 Socially Intelligent Agents

gry doll. For most of the kids, anger was the emotion most reliably recognized,
while surprise and sadness were harder to get right. Five of the six kids were
able to match many of the emotions on the first day. A three-year-old child
showed results that he could recognize more samples of an emotion with each
additional session of interaction. What the data did not provide is conclusive
evidence that ASQ taught emotion recognition: it is possible that the children’s
performance improvement was due to something besides emotion recognition.
A study including base line tests before and after using the system over a longer
duration would present results that are more conclusive.
Although the ASQ system can measure improvements by a child while using
the system, it does not assess improvements the child may show outside the
computer world. One mother reported that her son said, "I’m happy" with a
smile on his face at the dinner table with the family. She doesn’t remember him
expressing himself like that before. Also, she said that when he was picked up
from school he asked if he could go play with the dwarves. Such feedback is
promising; it needs to be gathered in a long-term systematic way in order to
understand how the effects of the system generalize to real life.

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge Roberto Tuchman and David Lubin at the Dan Marino Center in
Miami, Florida for their terrific help in evaluating the ASQ system.

Notes

1. We also computed: Response Rate to track the number of training trials (this measure includes both
correct and incorrect responses by the child, normalized by the time of the session), Accuracy as an index of
how effective the training procedures are for teaching the children to match the targeted emotion (consists
of a ratio of correct matches over total attempted matches, for each trial), and Fluency as a performance
summary of how many correct responses were made (this measure combines response rate and accuracy).
An accompanying thesis [1] provides formulas for these measures.
References

[1] K. Blocher. Affective social quest: Teaching emotion recognition with interactive media
and wireless expressive toys. SM Thesis, MIT, 1999.
[2] P. Eckman. An argument for basic emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 6, 1992.
[3] R. Picard. Affective Computing. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1997.
[4] M. Sigman and L. Capps. Children with Autism : A Developmental Perspective.Harvard
Press, Cambridge, MA, 1997.
[5] R. Tuchman. Personal communication. Conversation while conducting experiments at
Dan Marino Center in September 1999, 1999.