Authoring Negotiation Content and Programming Simulated Patients.

Competent negotiation with simulated patients can save expenses in medical education and improve outcomes for all parties involved. The use of simulated agents is beneficial for a study of human behaviour and cognition due to the possibility to create and manage a wide range of specific social situations. Building plausible cognitive models underlying the agent’s intelligent behaviour from scratch is challenging and costly. Interaction designers and cognitive engineers require sufficient background knowledge to decide which domain information, resources and activities are important. Domain experts require sufficient understanding of human interaction and social cognition. All may lack advanced software development skills and an access to sufficient amount of authentic data. This paper presents a methodology to author cognitive agents and interactions with them. Authors can easily encode agents’ knowledge and equip them with different sets of preferences and decision making strategies. This offers abundant opportunities for various social simulations: to create and control situations in which doctor’s decision making and negotiation skills can be applied and assessed; employ and relate specific action patterns to various strategies and sociopragmatic variables of interactional power, social distance and degree of imposition; predict outcomes and explain why the choices made lead to what specific outcomes. The proposed approach also enables efficient collection of significant amount of annotated dialogue data and can be applied to model various medical and not medical negotiation scenarios.