  Relating explicit psychological mechanisms and observable behaviours is a
central aim of psychological and behavioural science. We implemented the
principles of the Projective Consciousness Model into artificial agents
embodied as virtual humans, as a proof-of-concept for a methodological
framework aimed at simulating behaviours and assessing underlying psychological
parameters, in the context of experiments in virtual reality. We focus on
simulating the role of Theory of Mind (ToM) in the choice of strategic
behaviours of approach and avoidance to optimise the satisfaction of agents'
preferences. We designed an experiment in a virtual environment that could be
used with real humans, allowing us to classify behaviours as a function of
order of ToM, up to the second order. We show that our agents demonstrate
expected behaviours with consistent parameters of ToM in this experiment. We
also show that the agents can be used to estimate correctly each other order of
ToM. A similar approach could be used with real humans in virtual reality
experiments not only to enable human participants to interact with parametric,
virtual humans as stimuli, but also as a mean of inference to derive
model-based psychological assessments of the participants.
