Probabilistic Assessment of User’s Emotions During the Interaction with Educational Games

We describe preliminary research on how to monitor a user’s emotions and level of engagement during the interaction with educational games. We illustrate how the user’s emotional state can be assessed through a probabilistic model that takes into account the context of the interaction, the user’s personality and a variety of user’s bodily expressions that are known to be directly influenced by emotional reactions. The probabilistic model relies on influence diagrams to flexibly leverage any evidence related to the user’s emotional state, in order to estimate this state and any other related variable in the model. This is crucial in a modeling task in which the available evidence usually varies with the user and with each particular interaction. The probabilistic model we present is to be used by decision theoretic pedagogical agents to generate interventions aimed at achieving the best tradeoff between user’s learning and engagement during the interaction with educational games .