Marching to the Wrong Distant Drum: Pedagogic Agents, Emotion and Student Modelling

In the last few years there has been a strong growth of interest in pedagogical agents. Typically, these agents are represented to learners as simulated beings (dogs, bugs, ants, humans) existing in some virtual environment. Along with this new way of communicating with children there has been a corresponding rise of interest in emotional agents, agents that manifest some behaviour based on an underlying simulation of emotional state and rules that govern transitions from one state to another. Combining these two concepts, we now have the notion of emotional pedagogical agents. In this paper, we argue that this research direction is certainly a difficult one but may also be perilous. We sympathise with the research goal of modelling humans in the round, adding an emotional component to existing models of cognitive and sensorimotor behaviour. We can happily pursue this activity as a research goal which should lead to many interesting discussions even though we argue that adding an emotional component to a core cognitive model will not lead to a convincing model of a person, and may lead quickly to a research dead end.