Effects of Gaze and Arm Motion Kinesics on a Humanoid's Perceived Confidence, Eagerness to Learn, and Attention to the Task in a Teaching Scenario

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When human students practise new skills with a teacher, they often display nonverbal behaviours (e.g., head and limb movements, gaze, etc.) to communicate their level of understanding and expressing their interest in the task. Similarly, a student robot's capability to provide human teachers with social signals to express its internal state might improve learning outcomes. This could also lead to a more successful social interactions between intelligent robots and human teachers. However, to design successful nonverbal communication for a robot, we first need to understand how human teachers interpret such nonverbal cues when watching a trainee robot practising a task. Therefore, in this paper, we study the effects of different gaze behaviours as well as manipulating speed and smoothness of arm movement on human teachers' perception of a robot's (a) confidence, (b) eagerness to learn, and (c) attention to the task. In an online experiment, we asked the 167 participants (as teachers) to rate the behaviours of a trainee robot in the context of learning a physical task. The results suggest that splitting the robot's gaze between the teacher and the task not only affects the perceived attention, but can also make the robot appear to be more eager to learn. Furthermore, perceptions of all three attributes tested were systematically affected by varying parameters of the robot's arm movement trajectory while performing task actions.