Robot Gaze Behavior Affects Honesty in Human-Robot Interaction.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Schellen E
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8144295 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:There is an increased interest in using social robots to assist older adults during their daily life activities. As social robots are designed to interact with older users, it becomes relevant to study these interactions under the lens of social cognition. Gaze following, the social ability to infer where other people are looking at, deteriorates with older age. Therefore, the referential gaze from robots might not be an effective social cue to indicate spatial locations to older users. In this study, we explored the performance of older adults, middle-aged adults, and younger controls in a task assisted by the referential gaze of a Pepper robot. We examined age-related differences in task performance, and in self-reported social perception of the robot. Our main findings show that referential gaze from a robot benefited task performance, although the magnitude of this facilitation was lower for older participants. Moreover, perceived anthropomorphism of the robot varied less as a result of its referential gaze in older adults. This research supports that social robots, even if limited in their gazing capabilities, can be effectively perceived as social entities. Additionally, this research suggests that robotic social cues, usually validated with young participants, might be less optimal signs for older adults.Supplementary informationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12369-022-00926-6.
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Project description:BackgroundThe ability to follow one another's gaze plays an important role in our social cognition; especially when we synchronously perform tasks together. We investigate how gaze cues can improve performance in a simple coordination task (i.e., the mirror game), whereby two players mirror each other's hand motions. In this game, each player is either a leader or follower. To study the effect of gaze in a systematic manner, the leader's role is played by a robotic avatar. We contrast two conditions, in which the avatar provides or not explicit gaze cues that indicate the next location of its hand. Specifically, we investigated (a) whether participants are able to exploit these gaze cues to improve their coordination, (b) how gaze cues affect action prediction and temporal coordination, and (c) whether introducing active gaze behavior for avatars makes them more realistic and human-like (from the user point of view).Methodology/principal findings43 subjects participated in 8 trials of the mirror game. Each subject performed the game in the two conditions (with and without gaze cues). In this within-subject study, the order of the conditions was randomized across participants, and subjective assessment of the avatar's realism was assessed by administering a post-hoc questionnaire. When gaze cues were provided, a quantitative assessment of synchrony between participants and the avatar revealed a significant improvement in subject reaction-time (RT). This confirms our hypothesis that gaze cues improve the follower's ability to predict the avatar's action. An analysis of the pattern of frequency across the two players' hand movements reveals that the gaze cues improve the overall temporal coordination across the two players. Finally, analysis of the subjective evaluations from the questionnaires reveals that, in the presence of gaze cues, participants found it not only more human-like/realistic, but also easier to interact with the avatar.Conclusion/significanceThis work confirms that people can exploit gaze cues to predict another person's movements and to better coordinate their motions with their partners, even when the partner is a computer-animated avatar. Moreover, this study contributes further evidence that implementing biological features, here task-relevant gaze cues, enable the humanoid robotic avatar to appear more human-like, and thus increase the user's sense of affiliation.
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Project description:Interactive behavior among humans is governed by the dynamics of movement synchronization in a variety of repetitive tasks. This requires the interaction partners to perform for example rhythmic limb swinging or even goal-directed arm movements. Inspired by that essential feature of human interaction, we present a novel concept and design methodology to synthesize goal-directed synchronization behavior for robotic agents in repetitive joint action tasks. The agents' tasks are described by closed movement trajectories and interpreted as limit cycles, for which instantaneous phase variables are derived based on oscillator theory. Events segmenting the trajectories into multiple primitives are introduced as anchoring points for enhanced synchronization modes. Utilizing both continuous phases and discrete events in a unifying view, we design a continuous dynamical process synchronizing the derived modes. Inverse to the derivation of phases, we also address the generation of goal-directed movements from the behavioral dynamics. The developed concept is implemented to an anthropomorphic robot. For evaluation of the concept an experiment is designed and conducted in which the robot performs a prototypical pick-and-place task jointly with human partners. The effectiveness of the designed behavior is successfully evidenced by objective measures of phase and event synchronization. Feedback gathered from the participants of our exploratory study suggests a subjectively pleasant sense of interaction created by the interactive behavior. The results highlight potential applications of the synchronization concept both in motor coordination among robotic agents and in enhanced social interaction between humanoid agents and humans.
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Project description:Gaze behavior is an important social signal between humans as it communicates locations of interest. People typically orient their attention to where others look as this informs about others' intentions and future actions. Studies have shown that humans can engage in similar gaze behavior with robots but presumably more so when they adopt the intentional stance toward them (i.e., believing robot behaviors are intentional). In laboratory settings, the phenomenon of attending toward the direction of others' gaze has been examined with the use of the gaze-cueing paradigm. While the gaze-cueing paradigm has been successful in investigating the relationship between adopting the intentional stance toward robots and attention orienting to gaze cues, it is unclear if the repetitiveness of the gaze-cueing paradigm influences adopting the intentional stance. Here, we examined if the duration of exposure to repetitive robot gaze behavior in a gaze-cueing task has a negative impact on subjective attribution of intentionality. Participants performed a short, medium, or long face-to-face gaze-cueing paradigm with an embodied robot while subjective ratings were collected pre and post the interaction. Results show that participants in the long exposure condition had the smallest change in their intention attribution scores, if any, while those in the short exposure condition had a positive change in their intention attribution, indicating that participants attributed more intention to the robot after short interactions. The results also show that attention orienting to robot gaze-cues was positively related to how much intention was attributed to the robot, but this relationship became more negative as the length of exposure increased. In contrast to subjective ratings, the gaze-cueing effects (GCEs) increased as a function of the duration of exposure to repetitive behavior. The data suggest a tradeoff between the desired number of trials needed for observing various mechanisms of social cognition, such as GCEs, and the likelihood of adopting the intentional stance toward a robot.
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Project description:Many anticipated physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) applications in the near future are overground tasks such as walking assistance. For investigating the biomechanics of human movement during pHRI, this work presents Ophrie, a novel interactive robot dedicated for physical interaction tasks with a human in overground settings. Unique design requirements for pHRI were considered in implementing the one-arm mobile robot, such as the low output impedance and the ability to apply small interaction forces. The robot can measure the human arm stiffness, an important physical quantity that can reveal human biomechanics during overground pHRI, while the human walks alongside the robot. This robot is anticipated to enable novel pHRI experiments and advance our understanding of intuitive and effective overground pHRI.
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Project description:Most people struggle to understand probability which is an issue for Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) researchers who need to communicate risks and uncertainties to the participants in their studies, the media and policy makers. Previous work showed that even the use of numerical values to express probabilities does not guarantee an accurate understanding by laypeople. We therefore investigate if words can be used to communicate probability, such as "likely" and "almost certainly not". We embedded these phrases in the context of the usage of autonomous vehicles. The results show that the association of phrases to percentages is not random and there is a preferred order of phrases. The association is, however, not as consistent as hoped for. Hence, it would be advisable to complement the use of words with numerical expression of uncertainty. This study provides an empirically verified list of probabilities phrases that HRI researchers can use to complement the numerical values.
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Project description:Researchers have increasingly focused on how the potential for social interaction modulates basic processes of visual attention and gaze behavior. In this study, we investigated why people may experience social interaction and what factors contributed to their subjective experience. We furthermore investigated whether implying social interaction modulated gaze behavior to people's faces, specifically the eyes. To imply the potential for interaction, participants received either one of two instructions: 1) they would be presented with a person via a 'live' video-feed, or 2) they would be presented with a pre-recorded video clip of a person. Prior to the presentation, a confederate walked into a separate room to suggest to participants that (s)he was being positioned behind a webcam. In fact, all participants were presented with a pre-recorded clip. During the presentation, we measured participants' gaze behavior with an eye tracker, and after the presentation, participants were asked whether they believed that the confederate was 'live' or not, and, why they thought so. Participants varied greatly in their judgements about whether the confederate was 'live' or not. Analyses of gaze behavior revealed that a large subset of participants who received the live-instruction gazed less at the eyes of confederates compared with participants who received the pre-recorded-instruction. However, for both the live-instruction group and the pre-recorded instruction group, another subset of participants gazed predominantly at the eyes. The current findings may contribute to the development of experimental designs aimed to capture the interactive aspects of social cognition and visual attention.
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Project description:Robots have become vital to the delivery of health care and their personalities are often important to understanding their effectiveness as health care providers. Despite this, there is a lack of a systematic overarching understanding of personality in health care human-robot interaction. This makes it difficult to understand what we know and do not know about the impact of personality in health care human-robot interaction (H-HRI). As a result, our understanding of personality in H-HRI has not kept pace with the deployment of robots in various health care environments. To address this, the authors conducted a literature review that identified 18 studies on personality in H-HRI. This paper expands, refines, and further explicates the systematic review done in a conference proceedings [see: Esterwood (Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction, 2020, 87-95)]. Review results: 1) highlight major thematic research areas, 2) derive and present major conclusions from the literature, 3) identify gaps in the literature, and 4) offer guidance for future H-HRI researchers. Overall, this paper represents a reflection on the existing literature and provides an important starting point for future research on personality in H-HRI.
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