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Gaze Cueing and the Role of Presence in Human-Robot Interaction

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Social Robotics (ICSR 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13817))

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Abstract

Gaze cueing is a fundamental part of social interactions, and broadly studied using Posner task based gaze cueing paradigms. While studies using human stimuli consistently yield a gaze cueing effect, results from studies using robotic stimuli are inconsistent. Typically, these studies use virtual agents or pictures of robots. As previous research has pointed to the significance of physical presence in human-robot interaction, it is of fundamental importance to understand its yet unexplored role in interactions with gaze cues. This paper investigates whether the physical presence of the iCub humanoid robot affects the strength of the gaze cueing effect in human-robot interaction. We exposed 42 participants to a gaze cueing task. We asked participants to react as quickly and accurately as possible to the appearance of a target stimulus that was either congruently or incongruently cued by the gaze of a copresent iCub robot or a virtual version of the same robot. Analysis of the reaction time measurements showed that participants were consistently affected by their robot interaction partner’s gaze, independently on the way the robot was presented. Additional analyses of participants’ ratings of the robot’s anthropomorphism, animacy and likeability further add to the impression that presence does not play a significant role in simple gaze based interactions. Together our findings open up interesting discussions about the possibility to generalize results from studies using virtual agents to real life interactions with copresent robots.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.bartneck.de/2008/03/11/the-godspeed-questionnaire-series/.

  2. 2.

    github.com/Sabka/icub-hri-cuing.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the by the Czech Science Foundation (GAČR), project 20-24186X. The authors from Comenius University were additionally supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency, project APVV-21-0105 and by Slovak Society for Cognitive Science. We would like to dearly thank Jakub Rozlivek and Lukáš Rustler for their help in programming the iCub and Adam Rojík for organizing the recruitment of participants.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University, Vienna, Austria

    Kassandra Friebe

  2. Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics, Comenius University, Mlynská Dolina, 84248, Bratislava, Slovakia

    Kassandra Friebe, Sabína Samporová & Kristína Malinovská

  3. Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague, Technická 1902/2, 166 27 Praha 6 - Dejvice, Prague, Czechia

    Matej Hoffmann

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  1. Kassandra Friebe
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  2. Sabína Samporová
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  4. Matej Hoffmann
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Correspondence to Kassandra Friebe .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Florence, Florence, Italy

    Filippo Cavallo

  2. Qatar University, Doha, Qatar

    John-John Cabibihan

  3. University of Florence, Florence, Italy

    Laura Fiorini

  4. University of Florence, Florence, Italy

    Alessandra Sorrentino

  5. Wichita State University, Wichita, KS, USA

    Hongsheng He

  6. Qingdao University, Qingdao, China

    Xiaorui Liu

  7. National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Tsukuba, Japan

    Yoshio Matsumoto

  8. National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Shuzhi Sam Ge

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Friebe, K., Samporová, S., Malinovská, K., Hoffmann, M. (2022). Gaze Cueing and the Role of Presence in Human-Robot Interaction. In: Cavallo, F., et al. Social Robotics. ICSR 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13817. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24667-8_36

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24667-8_36

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