Lessons Learned in Modeling Schizophrenic and Depressed Responsive Virtual Humans for Training

Abstract

This paper describes lessons learned in developing the linguistic, cognitive, emotional, and gestural models underlying virtual human behavior in a training application designed to train civilian police officers how to recognize gestures and verbal cues indicating different forms of mental illness and how to verbally interact with the mentally ill. Schizophrenia, paranoia, and depression were all modeled for the application. For linguistics, the application has quite complex language grammars that captured a range of syntactic structures and semantic categories. For cognition, there is a great deal of augmentation to a plan-based transition network needed to model the virtual human’s knowledge. For emotions and gestures, virtual human behavior is based on expert-validated mapping tables specific to each mental illness. The paper presents five areas demanding continued research to improve virtual human behavior for use in training applications.