Evaluation of Novice and Expert Interpersonal Interaction Skills with a Virtual Patient

Interactive Virtual Standardized Patients (VP) can provide meaningful training for clinicians. These VP’s portray interactive embodied conversational characters with realistic representations of a mental or physical problem to be diagnosed or discussed. This research is a continuation of evaluating of our VP “Justina” [2] which suffers from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from a sexual attack and presents the results of comparing novices, test subjects without medical training, and experts interacting with ‘Justina’ to find out if they could elicit the proper responses to make a diagnosis and to investigate the topics and questions the novices asked for coverage of the categories and criteria of PTSD as defined in the DSM-IV [1]. It is assumed that novices will perform better than experts, however the main investigation is to gather empirical data and understand why this is true and how this can be used to improve the system. There have not been, to the authors’ knowledge, any studies in evaluating experts and non-experts with virtual human characters in the psychological domain. The subject testing method consisted of recruiting novice participants from USC staff, students and interns. A total of 9 people took part in the study (3 females, 6 males). This was compared against the experts from the previous study, 15 subjects consisting of, medical students, psychiatry residents and fellows (6 females, 9 males). The subjects filled out pre and post questionnaires, the dialog exchange is transcribed and classified into the PTSD categories.