Abstract

Keywords

۱٫ Introduction

۲٫ Methods

۳٫ Results

۴٫ Discussion

Declaration of Competing Interest

Acknowledgments

Appendix A. Supplementary data

References

ABSTRACT

Previous research has shown that eye contact, in human-human interaction, elicits increased affective and attention related psychophysiological responses. In the present study, we investigated whether eye contact with a humanoid robot would elicit these responses. Participants were facing a humanoid robot (NAO) or a human partner, both physically present and looking at or away from the participant. The results showed that both in human-robot and human-human condition, eye contact versus averted gaze elicited greater skin conductance responses indexing autonomic arousal, greater facial zygomatic muscle responses (and smaller corrugator responses) associated with positive affect, and greater heart deceleration responses indexing attention allocation. With regard to the skin conductance and zygomatic responses, the human model’s gaze direction had a greater effect on the responses as compared to the robot’s gaze direction. In conclusion, eye contact elicits automatic affective and attentional reactions both when shared with a humanoid robot and with another human.

Introduction

With the rapid progress in robotics over the past decade, so-called social robots are becoming a part of people’s lives. These robots are increasingly being designed to interact with people and to assist in various humane environments, such as schools, hospitals, and even homes. To ensure robots’ smooth integration to human society, we need to understand how people react to robots and interact with them (Breazeal et al., 2016). Studies investigating human-robot interaction (HRI) could also be used to advance the design of social robots.