Shifting of Focus of Perceptual Attention in Embodied Conversational Agents

We have developed a computational model of perceptual attention that interleaves top-down and bottom-up attention processes of an embodied agent in a virtual environment. What has been lacking in our model until now is how it would work when the one of the tasks being performed by the agent is holding a conversation with one or more agents. In this paper, we propose some modifications to our model that will integrate perceptual attention toward objects and locations in the environment with the need to look at other parties in a social context.