Designing an Emotional and Attentive Virtual Infant

This paper outlines the design of a model amalgamating computational visual attention and emotion approaches for the purposes of driving expressive attentive and emotional behaviour in an embodied, situated real-time virtual infant. The themes of emotion and attention underlie all aspects of our model: from perception, to memory, internal state and behaviour expressivity. The model is focused on some of the earliest stimulus evaluation checks related to appraisal theory: perceptual attention focuses and refines the details of relevant and potentially relevant stimuli, reducing uncertainty in order to discover reward and heed danger. In the process, the agents internal state is modified and feeds back to modulate the ongoing allocation of attention and processing of stimuli. Changes in internal state are expressed through a repertoire of prototypical infant gaze, face and body behaviours. This represents, to our knowledge, the first attempt to marry all of these concepts in a realtime 3D embodied agent system.