Using Emotional Memories to Form Synthetic Social Relationships

We present a simple, biologically-inspired mechanism by which synthetic entities can be made to form social relationships with each other. We describe an interactive multi-agent system, based on the social behavior of the gray wolf (Canis lupus), that features this mechanism of social relationship formation. This installation, shown at SIGGRAPH 2001, allowed several participants to direct semi-autonomous wolf pups in a virtual pack. In our mechanism, an entity has an emotional state that is affected by its interactions. It is able to recognize a social partner as the same individual on successive encounters. It learns an association between interacting with that social partner and its own current emotional state – an “emotional memory” of the partner. When the entity again encounters the social partner, its emotional memory of that partner influences its current emotional state. The emotional state, in turn, affects its expressive range of behavior. Finally, in the wake of each interaction, the entity revises its model of its emotional relationship with the social partner. Our mechanism for social relationship formation could be of use in a variety of domains, for example, creating believable virtual characters, building multi-agent systems, and designing human-computer interfaces.