Design and evaluation of an avatar-based cultural training system

Abstract

The need for cultural training for members of the military, and supporting government and industrial organizations, has become more important because of the increasing expectations of effective collaborations between people of different cultures in order to achieve common security objectives. Additionally, the number and mix of countries, and cultural groups within those countries, make traditional classroom training less feasible. While good simulations have been built for cultural understanding, they have not been developed widely or used for pre-deployment training. This paper describes and evaluates an avatar-based game for pre-deployment training. The game is built around two scenarios from the Afghan culture: a market scenario, and a local leadership council scenario. The game also allows participants to reverse roles and play the part of an Afghan interacting with an American solider. To evaluate this avatar-based game, we developed an experimental design to test the effectiveness of the game versus commonly used video instruction, and to test the effectiveness of role reversals in training with games. Results show that participants trained with the avatarbased game had significantly improved understanding of Afghan culture (p < 0:01). However, role reversal did not improve performance. Additionally, responses to a questionnaire showed that participants in the avatar-based game had a much greater appreciation for their understanding of the Afghan culture than the more video-trained control group.

Serious games in high-stakes assessment contexts: a systematic literature review into the game design principles for valid game-based performance assessment

“…These are further separated into professional competencies (see Supplementary Information SI2 for a full account). Examples include history taking (Alyami et al, 2019), crisis management (Steinrücke et al, 2020) and cultural understanding (Brown et al, 2018). Furthermore, the studies included in the review can be divided into three competency types: cognitive skills (n = 21), knowledge (n = 31), and motor skills (n = 4).…”

“…Examples of a task that was not authentic were found for all three competency types. Two SGs that targeted cognitive skills did not include an authentic task (Brown et al, 2018;Chee et al, 2019) as a result of implementing role reversals. Within these SGs, the players played in a reversed role fashion, and thus the task was not authentic for the task in the real working environment.…”

Assessing Children’s Perceptions of Live Interactions With Avatars: Preparations for Use in ASD Therapy in a Multi-Ethnic Context

“…the country where the application was developed compared to the country where it is used) or to the fact that the anthropomorphic characteristics of the avatars are developed based on stereotypes [65], [66]. In the field of education, Brown et al [67] and Lee [68] argue that avatars with ethnic characteristics provide greater possibilities of interaction, creating culturally diverse and inclusive virtual worlds. The impact of ethnic aspects is much less investigated in healthcare areas, although the ethical implications of interactions among patients and healthcare providers in virtual environments have been discussed [69].…”

Supporting Artificial Social Intelligence With Theory of Mind

“…Further, the agent could use its own prior experiences, modeled after episodic memories (Vinanzi et al, 2019 ), to make more accurate predictions about what might be the best way to remedy the situation. Given that such training is standard for military personnel (e.g., Brown et al, 2019 ), it might even be feasible to train an ASI for such scenarios. From this, the ASI could maintain richer contextually-based knowledge and teammate descriptors/evaluations/characteristics, allowing it to identify mental model mismatch and predict how those incongruencies may hinder interaction.…”