In this paper, we report an experimental study designed to examine how participants perceive and interpret social hints from gaze exhibited by either a robot or a human tutor when carrying out a matching task. The underlying notion is that knowing where an agent is looking at provides cues that can direct attention to an object of interest during the activity. In this regard, we asked human participants to play a card matching game in the presence of either a human or a robotic tutor under two conditions. In one case, the tutor gave hints to help the participant find the matching cards by gazing toward the correct match, in the other case, the tutor only looked at the participants and did not give them any help. The performance was measured based on the time and the number of tries taken to complete the game. Results show that gaze hints (helping tutor) made the matching task significantly easier (fewer tries) with the robot tutor. Furthermore, we found out that the robots’ gaze hints were recognized significantly more often than the human tutor gaze hints, and consequently, the participants performed significantly better with the robot tutor. The reported study provides new findings towards the use of non-verbal gaze hints in human–robot interaction, and lays out new design implications, especially for robot-based educative interventions.

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This paper presents a study that analyzes the effects of robots' gaze hints on children's performance in a cardmatching game. We conducted a within-subjects study, in which children played a card game "Memory" in the presence of a robot tutor in two sessions. In one session, the robot gave hints to help the child find matching cards by looking at the correct match and, in the other session, the robot only looked at the child and did not give them any help. Our findings show that the use of gaze hints (help condition) made the matching task significantly easier and that children used a significantly fewer number of tries than without help. This study provides guidelines on how to design interactive behaviors for robots taking the role of tutors to elicit help-seeking behavior in children.

In this paper, we present a study that analyses the effects of robot or human gaze hints on people's choices in a card game. We asked human participants to play a matching card game in the presence of a human or a robotic tutor. Our aim was to find out if gaze hints provided by the tutor can direct the attention and influence the choices of the human participants. The results show that participants performed significantly better when they received gaze hints from a tutor than when they did not. Furthermore, we found that people identified the tutor hints more often in robot condition than in human condition and, as a result, performed significantly better.