Emotional Agents with Team Roles to Support Human Group Training

In the teamwork research area there is an increasing interest about the principles behind team effectiveness and effective team training; for Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) Team Training is an excellent application area; nevertheless, the few reported works about IVAs in team training, illustrate both the use for the individualized teaching (Pedagogical Agents) of procedural tasks and the substitution of missing team members (Teammate Agents) to promote the practice of team tasks in relation to functional roles (Taskwork) [1].

Our interest on Intelligent Virtual Environments for Training (IVETs) has led us to propose a Team Training Strategy (TTS) whose purpose is to promote social skills as well as knowledge and skills related to tasks of socio technical nature. The alternatives that we are evaluated to improve the performance of human groups and to promote effective teams deal with: the use of scaffolding as the best tutoring approach, the promotion of social skills before technical skills, and especially, the selection of the best nonfunctional roles (team roles) balance according to the task.

In addition, our aim is to incorporate into an IVA called Pancho (Pedagogical AgeNt to support Colaborative Human grOups) the particular behaviors of Team Roles defined by Belbin [2]; Pancho, with a selected team role —according to a team model— will join the human group with the intention of improving the performance of the team (Teamwork) and providing scaffolding to the trainees (Taskwork). The Belbin’s categorization is the earliest and still the most popular. He states that the team role can be defined as a tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with each others at work in a certain distinctive ways; he also states that in teamwork, a good mix of team roles in the group is necessary for groups to use their technical skills optimally. The team roles defined by Belbin have very particular behaviors; we have selected a generic cognitive architecture for agents with emotionally influenced behaviors —called COGNITIVA— to realize those roles [3]. The constructs provided by this architecture (Personal traits, Concerns, Moods, Attitudes and Physical states) are being properly instantiated to generate the desired behaviors.