PCE simulation toolkit: a platform for perceptual crossing experiment research

Abstract

The Perceptual Crossing Experiment (PCE) has been the object of study for over a decade, and aims at explaining how we perceive, interact with, and understand each other in real-time. In addition to human participant studies, a number of computational models have investigated how virtual agents can solve this task. However, the set of implementation choices that has been explored to date is rather limited, and the large number of variables that can be used make it very difficult to replicate the results. The main objective of this paper is to describe the PCE Simulation Toolkit we have developed and published as an open-source repository on GitHub. We hope that this effort will help make future PCE simulation results reproducible and advance research in the understanding of possible behaviors in this experimental paradigm. At the end of this paper, we present two case studies of evolved agents that demonstrate how parameter choices affect the simulations.