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Agent Appearance Modulates Mind Attribution and Social Attention in Human-Robot Interaction

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Social Robotics (ICSR 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9388))

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Abstract

Gaze following occurs automatically in social interactions, but the degree to which we follow gaze strongly depends on whether an agent is believed to have a mind and is therefore socially relevant for the interaction. The current paper investigates whether the social relevance of a robot can be manipulated via its physical appearance and whether there is a linear relationship between appearance and gaze following in a counter-predictive gaze cueing paradigm (i.e., target appears with a high likelihood opposite of the gazed-at location). Results show that while robots are capable of inducing gaze following, the degree to which gaze is passively followed does not linearly decrease with physical human-likeness. Rather, the relationship between appearance and gaze following is best described by an inverted u-shaped pattern, with automatic cueing effects (i.e., attending to the cued location) for agents of mixed human-likeness and reversed cueing effects (i.e., attending to the predicted location) for agents of either full human-likeness (100% human) or full robot-likeness (100% robot). The results are interpreted with regard to cognitive resource theory and design implications are discussed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    Molly C. Martini, George A. Buzzell & Eva Wiese

Authors
  1. Molly C. Martini
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  2. George A. Buzzell
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  3. Eva Wiese
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Molly C. Martini .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Robotics and Computer Vision Lab, ENSTA-ParisTech, Palaiseau, France

    Adriana Tapus

  2. Inst für Informatik, Human-Ctr Multimedi, Universität Augsburg, Augsburg, Bayern, Germany

    Elisabeth André

  3. LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France

    Jean-Claude Martin

  4. Robotics and Computer Vision Lab, ENSTA-ParisTech, Palaiseau, France

    François Ferland

  5. LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France

    Mehdi Ammi

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© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Martini, M.C., Buzzell, G.A., Wiese, E. (2015). Agent Appearance Modulates Mind Attribution and Social Attention in Human-Robot Interaction. In: Tapus, A., André, E., Martin, JC., Ferland, F., Ammi, M. (eds) Social Robotics. ICSR 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9388. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25554-5_43

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25554-5_43

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-25553-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-25554-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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