Teaching Negotiation Skills through Practice and Reflection with Virtual Humans

Although representation of physical environments and behaviors will continue to play an important role in simulation-based training, an emerging challenge is representation of virtual humans with rich mental models (e.g., including emotions, trust) that interact through conversational behaviors as well as physical ones. 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’ understandings 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.