Putting the “Human ” into “Human Behavior

Intelligent Agents are often developed for the purposes of mimicking the behavior of a person performing a task. These “Human Behavior Models ” (HBMs) (Pew and Mavor 1998) are often used to perform complex tasks such as flying airplanes in simulation, interacting as non-player-characters in games, participating in teammates in simulation-based training environments, etc. These models ’ level of “human-ness ” can vary greatly across models and uses, at multiple levels. For the early work in this area, interest was primarily in the purely “rational” problem-solving aspects of human behavior: how does a human perform a task under normal conditions? These models are often guided by theory of human information processing, and typically included cognitive features such as memory, perception, and learning. But they also leav