How Turn-Taking Influences the Perception of a Suspect in Police Interviews

This thesis is part of a project where we are working towards a computational model for human-like turn-taking behaviour for an embodied conversational agent (ECA). This ECA will act as a suspect in a social skill training serious game supporting police interview training. Rich ECA turn-taking behaviour, including pauses, interrupts, and hesitation, is expected to support a more natural human-system interaction. Moreover, appropriate turn-taking behaviour can support the display of personality and emotional state of the virtual suspect. The question then is: how does turn-taking behaviour, realised using synthesized speech, in police interviews influence the perception a human observer gets from a virtual suspect? This thesis examines the relation between turn-taking and the perception of a suspect in a police interview. By a literature review we collected existing knowledge on factors that influence turn-taking in police interviews. In a perception study we investigated the influence of turn-taking on the impression that observers get from a suspect in simulated police interviews by looking at differences in perception scores for extracts of police interviews in which turn-taking was systematically varied.