Noticing Extroversion Effects Attention: How Robot and Participant Personality Affect Gaze Cueing

Abstract

Social robots with expressive gaze have positive effects on human-robot interaction. In particular, research suggests that when robots are programmed to express introverted or extroverted gaze behavior, individuals enjoy interacting more with robots that match their personality. However, how this affects social-cognitive performance during human-robot interactions has not been thoroughly examined yet. In the current paper, we examine whether the perceived match between human and robot personality positively affects the degree to which the robot’s gaze is followed (i.e., gaze cueing, as a proxy for more complex social-cognitive behavior). While social attention has been examined extensively outside of human-robot interaction, recent research shows that a robot’s gaze is attended to in a similar way as a human’s gaze. While our results did not support the hypothesis that gaze cueing would be strongest when the participant’s personality matched the robot’s personality, we did find evidence that participants followed the gaze of introverted robots more strongly than the gaze of extroverted robots. This finding suggests that agent’s displaying extroverted gaze behavior may hurt performance in human-robot interaction.