Skip to main content

Using Virtual Narratives to Explore Children’s Story Understanding.

Porteous, J., Charles, F., Smith, C., Cavazza, C., Mouw, J. and van den Broek, P., 2017. Using Virtual Narratives to Explore Children’s Story Understanding. In: International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 8-12 May 2017, Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Full text available as:

[img]
Preview
PDF
p773.pdf - Accepted Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives.

3MB

Official URL: http://www.aamas2017.org/

Abstract

Interactive Narratives are systems that use automated narrative generation techniques to create multiple story variants which can be shown to an audience, as virtual narratives, using cinematic staging techniques. Previous research in this area has focused on assessment of aspects such as the quality of the automatically generated narratives and their acceptance by the audience. However in our work we deviate from this to explore the use of interactive narratives to support cognitive psychology experiments in story understanding. We hypothesized that the use of virtual narratives would enable narrative comprehension to be studied independently of linguistic phenomena. To assess this we developed a demonstration interactive narrative featuring a virtual environment (Unity3D engine) based on a pre-existing children’s story which allows for the generation of variants of the original story that can be "told" via visualization in the 3D world. In the paper we introduce a narrative generation mechanism that provides control over insertion of cues facilitating story understanding, whilst also ensuring that the plot itself is unaffected. An intuitive user interface allows experimenters to insert and order cues and specific events while the narrative generation techniques ensure these requests are effected in a consistent fashion. We also report the results of a field experiment with children (age 9-10) that demonstrates the potential for the use of virtual narratives in story understanding experiments. Our results demonstrated acceptance of virtual narratives, the usability of the system and the impact of cue insertion on inference and story understanding.

Item Type:Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Group:Faculty of Science & Technology
ID Code:27453
Deposited By: Symplectic RT2
Deposited On:01 Mar 2017 12:45
Last Modified:14 Mar 2022 14:03

Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

More statistics for this item...
Repository Staff Only -