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Human unintentional and intentional interpersonal coordination in interaction with a humanoid robot.

ABSTRACT: In order to establish natural social synchrony between two humans, two requirements need to be fulfilled. First, the coupling must be bi-directional. The two humans react to each other's actions. Second, natural social bodily synchronization has to be intentional or unintentional. Assuming that these essential aspects of human-human interactions are present, the present paper investigates whether similar bodily synchrony emerges between an interacting human and an artificial agent such as a robot. More precisely, we investigate whether the same human unintentional rhythmic entrainment and synchronization is present in Human Robot Interaction (HRI). We also evaluate which model (e.g., an adaptive vs non adaptive robot) better reproduces such unintentional entrainment. And finally, we compare interagent coordination stability of the HRI under 1) unidirectional (robot with fixed frequency) versus bidirectional (robot with adaptive frequency) rhythmic entrainment and 2) human intentional versus unintentional coupling. Fifteen young adults made vertical arm movements in front of the NAO robot under five different conditions of intentional/unintentional and unidirectional/bidirectional interactions. Consistent with prior research investigating human-human interpersonal coordination, when humans interact with our robot, (i) unintentional entrainment was present, (ii) bi-directional coupling produced more stable in-phase un-intentional and intentional coordination, (iii) and intentional coordination was more stable than unintentional coordination. To conclude, this study provides a foundation for modeling future social robots involving unintentional and bidirectional synchronization-aspects which seem to enhance humans' willingness to interact with robots.

SUBMITTER: Mostafaoui G

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8769320 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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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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Human unintentional and intentional interpersonal coordination in interaction with a humanoid robot.

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