No abstract

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.

This paper presents an examination of the possible competition and cooperation that may take place in human visual attention, between the bottom-up saliencies incurred by photometric signatures and the top-down saliencies incurred by the primary context of a scene. It is found that the strength of the primary context of a scene represents a dominant guiding factor for determining the visual fixations for attention: in the case where there exists a strong context in a scene, the objects and/or regions that are tightly coupled with the context dominate for defining the saliencies that guide fixations for attention. It appears that, in human visual perception, a higher priority is assigned to the efficient understanding of a visual context than the direct response to photometric saliencies not supported by the context. The claims described above are derived from the experimental verification of the following conjectures: 1) There is a tendency for the bottomup saliencies to be more significant when the context of the scenes observed is either weak or nonexistent. 2) For the scene of a strong context, the top-down context saliencies such as the objects and regions that are associated with understanding the present context tend to dominate over the bottom-up saliencies. 3) When the scene of a strong context includes both positive and negative saliencies, where the positive/negative contextual saliencies are referred to here as those saliencies significant for understanding the context yet well-expected/unexpected for the given context in terms of the prior knowledge, the negative saliencies are assigned a higher priority than the positive saliencies for attention.