Unveiling the reasoning processes of robots through introspective dialogues in a storytelling system: A study on the elicited empathy

The work studies the empathy elicited by a storytelling system in which the characters in the story are interpreted by humanoid robots and modelled as cognitive agents. The ACT-R architecture is exploited to shape the characters' personalities and equip them with knowledge and behaviours typical of social practices. The narration is enriched with gestures and emotional expressions obtained by setting parameters that can be correlated to some emotions, such as the pitch and speech rate, the LEDs colour and the head inclination. The system has been evaluated by comparing a simple narrative modality with an enhanced one, where an introspective dialogue is adopted to explain and let transparent the internal reasoning processes of the characters. The obtained results show that storytelling affected the cognitive component of empathy, especially through the advanced narrative mode.