Keywords

synthetic personality, synthetic personality dynamics, intentionality, synthetic characters, emotion modeling

Abstract

Creating engaging, interactive, and immersive synthetic characters is a difficult task and evaluating the success of a synthetic character is often even more difficult. The later problem is solved by extending Turing's Imitation Game thusly: computational construct should be evaluated based on the criteria of how well the character can mimic a human. In order to accomplish a successful evaluation of the proposed metric, synthetic characters must be consistently believable and capable of role-appropriate emotional expression. The author believes traditional synthetic characters must be improved to meet this goal. For a synthetic character to be believable, human users must be able to perceive a link between the mental state of the character and its behaviors. That is to say, synthetic characters must possess intentionality. In addition to intentionality, the mental state of the character must be human-like in order to provide an adequate frame of reference for the human users' internal simulations, to wit, the character's mental state must be comprised of a synthetic model of personality, of personality dynamics, and of cognition, each of which must be psychologically valid and of sufficient fidelity for the type of character represented. The author proposes that synthetic characters possessing these three models are more accurately described as synthetic personalities. The author proposes and implements computational models of personality, personality dynamics, and cognition in order to evaluate the psychological veracity of these models and computational equivalence between the models and the implementation as a first step in the process of creating believable synthetic personalities.

Notes

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Graduation Date

2005

Semester

Spring

Advisor

Cannon-Bowers, Jan

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

College

College of Arts and Sciences

Degree Program

Modeling and Simulation

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0000422

URL

http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0000422

Language

English

Release Date

May 2005

Length of Campus-only Access

None

Access Status

Doctoral Dissertation (Open Access)

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