Abstract
As robots are increasingly deployed in settings requiring social interaction, research is needed to examine the social signals perceived by humans when robots display certain social cues. In this paper, we report a study designed to examine how humans interpret social cues exhibited by robots. We first provide a brief overview of perspectives from social cognition in humans and how these processes are applicable to human–robot interaction (HRI). We then discuss the need to examine the relationship between social cues and signals as a function of the degree to which a robot is perceived as a socially present agent. We describe an experiment in which social cues were manipulated on an iRobot AvaTM mobile robotics platform in a hallway navigation scenario. Cues associated with the robot’s proxemic behavior were found to significantly affect participant perceptions of the robot’s social presence and emotional state while cues associated with the robot’s gaze behavior were not found to be significant. Further, regardless of the proxemic behavior, participants attributed more social presence and emotional states to the robot over repeated interactions than when they first interacted with it. Generally, these results indicate the importance for HRI research to consider how social cues expressed by a robot can differentially affect perceptions of the robot’s mental states and intentions. The discussion focuses on implications for the design of robotic systems and future directions for research on the relationship between social cues and signals.
Highlights
The infusion of robots into society has expanded from industrialized environments to increasingly complex operations and even personal service contexts (Jones and Schmidlin, 2011)
For research in human–robot interaction (HRI), we suggest that an important question to consider, in the context of social–cognitive mechanisms, is the degree to which robots are able to convey a sense of social presence as a function of the social cues they display and the social signals that the cues convey to an observer
Because emotion is a foundational element of social interaction, and, often, a driver of mental state attribution, we suggest that in HRI, it is essential to examine both cognitive and emotional mental state attributions made to a robot as a function of cues displayed by the robot
Summary
The infusion of robots into society has expanded from industrialized environments to increasingly complex operations and even personal service contexts (Jones and Schmidlin, 2011). Robots are engaged in human–robot interaction (HRI), not just in industrialized settings, and in healthcare (e.g., Mutlu and Forlizzi, 2008), education (e.g., Saerbeck et al, 2010), therapeutic contexts (e.g., Ferrari et al, 2009; Robins et al, 2009), and in military (e.g., Yamauchi, 2004) and civil service operations (e.g., Murphy, 2004) This has created a tremendous amount of research addressing technological issues, ranging from robotic movement and control in engineering, to modeling cognition and social behavior in computer and cognitive science. Research is needed to develop social-cognitive models supporting the ability of robots to interpret social cues so as to understand the intentions behind such actions, as well as understand how to display the appropriate social cues that can signal its own intentions to a human (see Breazeal et al, 2005)
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