Picture Books 2 generates fable-like stories for children age 6 to 8 years old based on an input picture comprising of three scenes. Currently the system is able to generate stories that show transitions and movement of characters and objects across the adjacent scenes of the input picture. However some of the stories produced are illogical. This study explores an approach to enhancing the onto...

In this paper, we describe our findings from research designed to explore the effect of virtual human counselors' self-disclosure using intimate human back stories on real human clients' social responses in psychological counseling sessions. To investigate this subject, we designed an experiment involving two conditions of the counselors' self-disclosure: human back stories and computer back st...

Previous research has shown that information that is repeated is more likely to be rated as true than information that has not been heard before. The current experiment examines whether familiarity with false news stories would increase rates of truthfulness and plausibility for these events. Further, the experiment tested whether false stories that were familiar would result in the creation of...

For millennia, adults have told children stories not only to entertain but also to impart important moral lessons to promote prosocial behaviors. Many such stories contain anthropomorphized animals because it is believed that children learn from anthropomorphic stories as effectively, if not better than, from stories with human characters, and thus are more inclined to act according to the mora...

Stories are pervasive in conversation between people [5]. They are used to establish identity pass on cultural heritage, and build rapport. Often stories are swapped when one conversational participant will reply to a story with a story. Stories are also told by virtual humans [1, 6, 2]. In creating or mining stories for a virtual human (VH) to tell, there are a number of considerations that co...

The present study investigates the perception of technical descriptions and of stories where the events are driven by the motivations and emotions of their characters. The study is explorative, using mixed qualitative and quantitative methods and with a total of 10 participants. The participants accepted the use of stories and strongly preferred stories with emotional and dramatic elements. The...

Mothers from two middle-class contexts from Berlin, Germany (n = 35), and Delhi, India (n = 28) told a baby story to their 3-year olds about an event that had happened during the children's first year of life. The contexts represented two cultural models: the model of psychological autonomy (Berlin) and the model of autonomy-relatedness (Delhi). We investigated the culture-specific functions of...

week about AI, or any other topic, requires more than searching for individual terms. Since it is time-consuming to find and post interesting stories manually, we have designed and written an AI program called NewsFinder1 that automatically collects English-language news stories from the web, categorizes them with trained models, filters out uninteresting and unrelated stories based on a set of...