Teaching Negotiation Skills through Practice and Reflection with Virtual Humans

TitleTeaching Negotiation Skills through Practice and Reflection with Virtual Humans
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2006
AuthorsCore, M., D. R. Traum, H. C. Lane, W. Swartout, S. Marsella, J. Gratch, and M. van Lent
JournalSimulation: Transactions of the Society for Modeling and Simulation, 82:685--701, 2006.
VolumeVolume 82
Start Page685--701
Issue11
Date PublishedNovember 2006
Keywordsconversation strategies, emotion modeling, explanation systems, intelligent tutoring systems, negotiation training, Virtual Humans
Abstract

Although the representation of physical environments and behaviors will continue to play an important role in simulation-based training, an emerging challenge is the representation of virtual humans with rich mental models (e.g., including emotions, trust) that interact through conversational as well as physical behaviors. The motivation for such simulations is training soft skills such as leadership, cultural awareness, and negotiation, where the majority of actions are conversational, and the problem solving involves consideration of the emotions, attitudes, and desires of others.The educational power of such simulations can be enhanced by the integration of an intelligent tutoring system to support learners’ understanding of the effect of their actions on virtual humans and how they might improve their performance. In this paper, we discuss our efforts to build such virtual humans, along with an accompanying intelligent tutor, for the domain of negotiation and cultural awareness.

URLhttp://sim.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/82/11/685