Contemporary Supervised Machine Learning (SML) and explainable AI (artificial intelligence) methods can be employed to both model and understand the decision making behavior of human actors within a multi-agent task setting. Here, we apply such modeling approach to capture the decision-making behavior of human actors playing a 3-player online herding game called “Desert Herding”. Of particular interest is whether the modeling approach can be employed to predict and understand the target switching strategies of human herders at variable prediction horizons and whether the explainable AI tool SHAP can be leveraged to identify the key informational variables (features) underlying the players’ target selection decisions.

Embodied virtual interactions can contribute to more immersive perspective taking experiences, which in turn can increase empathy and affiliation. This study sought to investigate these outcomes in the context of unconscious bias related to gender identity during interpersonal interactions. We conducted a simulated interview in virtual reality, in which participants embodied a transgender or cisgender avatar and interacted with a human-controlled agent (transgender woman). Preliminary results reveal differences between women and men in their experiences of empathy and emotional state when embodied as a transgender avatar.

Recommender systems designed to augment human decision-making in multi-agent tasks need to not only recommend actions that align with the task goal, but which also maintain coordinative behaviors between agents. Further, if these systems are to be used for skill training, they need to impart implicit learning to its users. This work compared a recommender system trained using deep reinforcement learning to a heuristic-based system in recommending actions to human participants teaming with an artificial agent during a collaborative problem-solving task. In addition to evaluating task performance and learning, we also evaluate the extent to which the human action are congruent with the recommended actions.