Joint attention has been shown to be not only crucial for human-human interaction but also human-robot interaction. Joint attention can help to make cooperation more efficient, support disambiguation in instances of uncertainty and make interactions appear more natural and familiar. In this paper, we present an autonomous gaze system that uses multimodal perception capabilities to model responsive joint attention mechanisms. We investigate the effects of our system on people's perception of a robot within a problem-solving task. Results from a user study suggest that responsive joint attention mechanisms evoke higher perceived feelings of social presence on scales that regard the direction of the robot's perception.

No abstract

We previously introduced a responsive joint attention system that uses multimodal information from users engaged in a spatial reasoning task with a robot and communicates joint attention via the robot's gaze behavior [25]. An initial evaluation of our system with adults showed it to improve users' perceptions of the robot's social presence. To investigate the repeatability of our prior findings across settings and populations, here we conducted two further studies employing the same gaze system with the same robot and task but in different contexts: evaluation of the system with external observers and evaluation with children. The external observer study suggests that third-person perspectives over videos of gaze manipulations can be used either as a manipulation check before committing to costly real-time experiments or to further establish previous findings. However, the replication of our original adults study with children in school did not confirm the effectiveness of our gaze manipulation, suggesting that different interaction contexts can affect the generalizability of results in human-robot interaction gaze studies.

No abstract

No abstract