Abstract
As the result of recent progress in technology of communication robot, robots are becoming an important social partner for humans. Behavioral synchrony is understood as an important factor in establishing good human-robot relationships. In this study, we hypothesized that biasing a human’s attitude toward a robot changes the degree of synchrony between human and robot. We first examined whether eyeblinks were synchronized between a human and an android in face-to-face interaction and found that human listeners’ eyeblinks were entrained to android speakers’ eyeblinks. This eyeblink synchrony disappeared when the android speaker spoke while looking away from the human listeners but was enhanced when the human participants listened to the speaking android while touching the android’s hand. These results suggest that eyeblink synchrony reflects a qualitative state in human-robot interactions.
Highlights
As the result of recent progress in technology of communication robot, robots are becoming an important social partner for humans
The first experiment was performed to examine whether eyeblink synchrony occurred between a human listener and an android speaker
The present study clearly shows that eyeblink synchrony does occur between human listeners and android speakers in face-to-face interaction
Summary
As the result of recent progress in technology of communication robot, robots are becoming an important social partner for humans. We first examined whether eyeblinks were synchronized between a human and an android in face-to-face interaction and found that human listeners’ eyeblinks were entrained to android speakers’ eyeblinks This eyeblink synchrony disappeared when the android speaker spoke while looking away from the human listeners but was enhanced when the human participants listened to the speaking android while touching the android’s hand. There was a possibility that androids—humanoid robots with a human-like appearance—may not be accepted as a target of synchronous behavior due to certain negative characteristics that androids display, such as the “uncanny valley”[15] For these androids to be recognized as reliable social entities, it is worth investigating whether humans show synchrony toward androids. To examine whether the non-verbal expression of an www.nature.com/scientificreports/
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