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Age-Related Differences in the Perception of Eye-Gaze from a Social Robot

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Social Robotics (ICSR 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13086))

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Abstract

The sensibility to deictic gaze declines naturally with age and often results in reduced social perception. Thus, the increasing efforts in developing social robots that assist older adults during daily life tasks need to consider the effects of aging. In this context, as non-verbal cues such as deictic gaze are important in natural communication in human-robot interaction, this paper investigates the performance of older adults, as compared to younger adults, during a controlled, online (visual search) task inspired by daily life activities, while assisted by a social robot. This paper also examines age-related differences in social perception. Our results showed a significant facilitation effect of head movement representing deictic gaze from a Pepper robot on task performance. This facilitation effect was not significantly different between the age groups. However, social perception of the robot was less influenced by its deictic gaze behavior in older adults, as compared to younger adults. This line of research may ultimately help informing the design of adaptive non-verbal cues from social robots for a wide range of end users.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.softbankrobotics.com.

  2. 2.

    https://youtu.be/6zSgm8jEnCM.

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Acknowledgments

This work is funded by the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 754285, by the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program (WASP) funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, and by the RobWellproject (No RTI2018-095599-A-C22) funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades. We want to thank the universities that helped us with the sample recruiting process: Complutense University of Madrid, University Carlos III of Madrid, University of Murcia and University of Alicante. The authors thank Neziha Akalin and Estefanía Sánchez-Pastor for their support in the initial stages of this study.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Applied Autonomous Sensor Systems, Örebro University, 702 81, Örebro, Sweden

    Lucas Morillo-Mendez, Amy Loutfi & Oscar Martinez Mozos

  2. Center for Health and Medical Psychology, Örebro University, 702 81, Örebro, Sweden

    Martien G. S. Schrooten

Authors
  1. Lucas Morillo-Mendez
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  2. Martien G. S. Schrooten
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  3. Amy Loutfi
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  4. Oscar Martinez Mozos
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lucas Morillo-Mendez .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronic and Communication Engineering, National University of Singapore, Faculty of Engineering, Singapore, Singapore

    Haizhou Li

  2. The National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Shuzhi Sam Ge

  3. A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore, Singapore

    Yan Wu

  4. Center for Human Technologies, Istituto Italiano Tecnologia, Genoa, Italy

    Agnieszka Wykowska

  5. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Wichita State University, Wichita, KS, USA

    Hongsheng He

  6. Qingdao University, Qingdao, China

    Xiaorui Liu

  7. School of Cyber Science and Technology, Beihang University, Beijing, Beijing, China

    Dongyu Li

  8. Social Cognition Human-Robot Interaction, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genoa, Italy

    Jairo Perez-Osorio

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Morillo-Mendez, L., Schrooten, M.G.S., Loutfi, A., Mozos, O.M. (2021). Age-Related Differences in the Perception of Eye-Gaze from a Social Robot. In: Li, H., et al. Social Robotics. ICSR 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13086. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90525-5_30

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90525-5_30

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-90524-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-90525-5

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