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This paper explores the relationship between the aging cue of a robotic avatar and the level of intelligence and safety perceived by the elderly as users. This initial study found that the avatar aging cue indeed, affects the elderly in their perception of the embodied robot, in terms not only of its intelligence but also of its safety: the elderly perceived the robot more intelligent and safer with older avatars.Due to the fact that the elderly perceived the aging cue of avatars as an effect of their expectation and interactions with the robot, the finding related to the avatar-user aging cue influences in the design of a series of attributions of the embodied robot. Therefore, the result of this study can provide interaction designers with a guideline in creating the visual appearance of an embodied agency in terms of its aging cue.

This paper aims at finding the answer to the essential question: Can people perceive a robot's presence as having a social existence? We attempt to apply a sociological and psychological approach to understand the influence of robot beings, by observing human emotion and perception changes while subjects watched a funny video clip in the presence of a robot or a human companion, each of which made their own typical laughing sounds. From this experiment, we found that the robot did not affect the human's positive emotions as much as a human companion did, but the robot did discourage negative emotions. However, the subjects were, in general, amused when they were watching the video with the robot. This amusement is similar to the contagious effect of sharing humor with another human being. Our findings suggest that the subjects accepted the robot's presence as a kind of existence empathically.

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