Abstract
Initiating joint attention by leading someone's gaze is a rewarding experience which facilitates social interaction. Here, we investigate this experience of leading an agent's gaze while applying a more realistic paradigm than traditional screen-based experiments. We used an embodied robot as our main stimulus and recorded participants' eye movements. Participants sat opposite a robot that had either of two ‘identities’—‘Jimmy’ or ‘Dylan’. Participants were asked to look at either of two objects presented on screens to the left and the right of the robot. Jimmy then looked at the same object in 80% of the trials and at the other object in the remaining 20%. For Dylan, this proportion was reversed. Upon fixating on the object of choice, participants were asked to look back at the robot's face. We found that return-to-face saccades were conducted earlier towards Jimmy when he followed the gaze compared with when he did not. For Dylan, there was no such effect. Additional measures indicated that our participants also preferred Jimmy and liked him better. This study demonstrates (a) the potential of technological advances to examine joint attention where ecological validity meets experimental control, and (b) that social reorienting is enhanced when we initiate joint attention.This article is part of the theme issue ‘From social brains to social robots: applying neurocognitive insights to human–robot interaction’.
Highlights
Humans are efficient in processing social information from others’ gaze [1,2]
The interaction effect between identity and contingency for the return-to-face saccades indicates that attentional engagement with the robot was facilitated after initiating joint attention, but only if the robot typically followed the participant’s gaze
Whereas a similar but screen-based study found a main effect in which return-to-face saccades were faster towards the jointattention robot avatar than towards the disjoint-attention one [8], the current study suggests that an agent’s joint-attention disposition drives further interaction
Summary
Humans are efficient in processing social information from others’ gaze [1,2]. The gaze-cueing effect, in which spatial orienting is facilitated by receiving the redirection of an agent’s gaze [3,4] is one example. That, as mentioned above, replication of previous screen-based findings would be a ‘mere’ replication, but it would show that findings obtained in controlled (but artificial) set- 2 ups generalize to more ecologically valid scenarios, with embodied agents that can manipulate the environment (in contrast to stimuli only presented on the screen) It would serve as a proof of concept that traditional paradigms of cognitive experimental psychology can be successfully implemented in a human –robot-interaction scenario, with replicable results and adequate scientific rigour—a task that is not trivial, given the technological challenges of integrating various components of the set-up (the humanoid robot, an eyetracker, stimulus presentation and response collection software) with excellent temporal synchronization that is required. We presented a theory of mind test and a recently developed intentional stance recently developed questionnaire [18] directly after the participants completed the experimental session with each robot identity
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