Age-Related Differences in the Perception of Eye-Gaze from a Social Robot

Abstract

The sensibility to deictic gaze declines naturally with age and often results in reduced social perception. Thus, the increasing efforts in developing social robots that assist older adults during daily life tasks need to consider the effects of aging. In this context, as non-verbal cues such as deictic gaze are important in natural communication in human-robot interaction, this paper investigates the performance of older adults, as compared to younger adults, during a controlled, online (visual search) task inspired by daily life activities, while assisted by a social robot.This paper also examines age-related differences in social perception. Our results showed a significant facilitation effect of head movement representing deictic gaze from a Pepper robot on task performance. This facilitation effect was not significantly different between the age groups. However, social perception of the robot was less influenced by its deictic gaze behavior in older adults, as compared to younger adults. This line of research may ultimately help informing the design of adaptive non-verbal cues from social robots for a wide range of end users.

Can the robot “see” what I see? Robot gaze drives attention depending on mental state attribution

“…Similarly, the ethnicity of the facial cue also affects the cueing effect (Zhang et al, 2021). Moreover, the decline in eye gaze following is associated with aging (McKay et al, 2022;Morillo-Mendez et al, 2022) and, most relevant for the current study, the gaze cueing effect is moderated by mentalizing (Dalmaso et al, 2020). This moderation is unique to face and gaze cues but not seen with non-social cues such as arrows in similar spatial cueing tasks (Kawai, 2011).…”

“…Second, we used a NAO robot whose gazing capabilities can only be conveyed through head movement. Although effective in inducing consistent cueing effects (Morillo-Mendez et al, 2022, this rigidity can still be perceived as an ambiguous social cue by the viewer since humans convey gaze through a combination of head and eye movements. According to the schema theory of gaze cueing, mental state attribution would exert more influence in attenuating the gaze cueing effect with more ambiguous gaze cues, such as gaze direction induced by the head's orientation (but not the eyes) of a robot, as in the current experimental setup.…”

“…Indeed, research with robotic agents and people with difficulties related to social cognition has shown mixed results, with some studies showing similar gaze following in robots and humans (e.g., as a result of aging, Morillo-Mendez et al 2022) and others showing different patterns between them (e.g., autism spectrum, Wiese et al 2014). Given this complex research landscape, future research is warranted to continue exploring social cognition with different models of social robots in diverse populations.…”

“…Gaze cueing effects of robotic gaze have been consistently found with different anthropomorphic robots, including sophisticated ones with eye movement (Kompatsiari et al, 2021;Ciardo and Wykowska, 2022) and those without eye movement (Chaminade and Okka, 2013;Morillo-Mendez et al, 2022. This finding does not automatically categorize such robots as social agents as non-social stimuli such as arrows can also induce automatic gaze cueing effects (Kawai, 2011;Slessor et al, 2016).…”