Interacting with a Social Robot Affects Visual Perception of Space

Abstract

Human partners are very effective at coordinating in space and time. Such ability is particular remarkable considering that visual perception of space is a complex inferential process, which is affected by individual prior experience (e.g. the history of previous stimuli). As a result, two partners might perceive differently the same stimulus. Yet, they find a way to align their perception, as demonstrated by the high degree of coordination observed in sports or even in everyday gestures as shaking hands. Robots would need a similar ability to align with their partner's perception. However, to date there is no knowledge of how the inferential mechanism supporting visual perception operates during social interaction. In the current work, we use a humanoid robot to address this question. We replicate a standard protocol for the quantification of perceptual inference in a HRI setting. Participants estimated the length of a set of segments presented by the humanoid robot iCub. The robot behaved in one condition as a mechanical arm driven by a computer and in another condition as an interactive, social partner. Even if the stimuli presented were the same in the two conditions, length perception was different when the robot was judged as an interactive agent rather than a mechanical tool. When playing with the social robot, participants relied significantly less on stimulus history. This result suggests that the brain changes optimization strategies during interaction and lay the foundations to design humanaware robot visual perception. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing~Interaction design • Humancentered computing~Collaborative and social computing devices

A Humanoid Social Agent Embodying Physical Assistance Enhances Motor Training Experience

“…Even so, the mere intervention of a seemingly social humanoid assistant had an impact on participants' training. This expands to the context of learning previous results obtained in the perceptual domain, where the mere exhibition of social behavior by a humanoid robot had a significant impact on the human partner's perception [26]. Then, we expect that endowing the robot with the possibility to adapt its social response to the partner's status will increase dramatically the effect of the robot tutoring on participants' experience.…”

The world seems different in a social context: a neural network analysis of human experimental data

“…Central tendency, also known as context dependency or regression to the mean [10], is a well-known perceptual phenomenon revealing the use of prior experience in perception and refers to the human tendency to generalize their perceptual judgments towards the mean of the previously perceived stimuli. This phenomenon has been recently explored in the field of visual and auditory perception of time intervals [9,11,12,13] and spatial distances [14,15].…”

“…Previous studies have shown that central tendency is dependent on the developmental stage of a person [14,12]. Interestingly, however, it also has been demonstrated that the extent to which humans generalize towards the mean can change rapidly depending to the context, such as whether a person is completing the task alone or together with another agent [15]. In particular, when interacting with a social human-like robot, participants exhibited lower central tendency and produced sensory stimuli more accurately than when they interacted with the same robot behaving mechanically, and than when they performed the task by themselves [15].…”

“…It also affects the processes of perception-action underlying joint-action [26,27], and the adoption of different game strategies [28]. Finally, it influences perception of space [29,30,15]. Specifically, the perceptual phenomenon of central tendency seems to indicate that a social interactive context might modify the reliance on priors.…”

“…From this perspective, here, we train an artificial neural network on the human experimental data from [15] to better understand the neural mechanisms underlying the condition-dependent variation of reliance on the prior that were found in the human behavior. Specifically, we are interested in the mechanisms that play a role in how humans differentiate between individual and social task conditions.…”