Let Me Get To Know You Better

Abstract

With an ever increasing demand for personal service robots and artificial assistants, companies, start-ups and researchers aim to better understand what makes robot platforms more likable. Some argue that increasing a robot's humanlikeness leads to a higher acceptability. Others, however, find that extremely humanlike robots are perceived as uncanny and are consequently often rejected by users. When investigating people's perception of robots, the focus of the related work lies almost solely on the first impression of these robots, often measured based on images or video clips of the robots alone. Little is known about whether these initial positive or negative feelings persist when giving people the chance to interact with the robot. In this paper, 48 participants were gradually exposed to the capabilities of a robot and their perception of it was tracked from their first impression to after playing a short interactive game with it. We found that initial uncanny feelings towards the robot were significantly decreased after getting to know it better, which further highlights the importance of using real interactive scenarios when studying people's perception of robots. In order to elicit uncanny feelings, we used the 3D blended embodiment Furhat and designed four different facial textures for it. Our work shows that a blended platform can cause different levels of discomfort towards it depending on the facial texture and may thus be an interesting tool for further research on the uncanny valley. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI; Natural language interfaces; • Computer systems organization → Robotics; • Computing methodologies → Intelligent agents.

I Can See It in Your Eyes: Gaze as an Implicit Cue of Uncanniness and Task Performance in Repeated Interactions With Robots

“…by blending the humanlike and the mechanical face, keeping features from both of them. The particular set of facial textures utilized in this study is based on a interactive study we ran with the Furhat robot where we found that the morph robot elicited significantly higher discomfort than both the humanlike and the mechanical texture (Paetzel and Castellano, 2019). In previous work, we additionally validated the blending technique on another set of humanlike and mechanical textures and found some of the corresponding morphs to elicit significantly higher feelings of discomfort in participants compared to the original humanlike and mechanical textures (Paetzel et al, 2018).…”

“…(2) progressively exposing people to the multimodal behaviors of a robot improves people's perception of it (Paetzel and Castellano, 2019); and (3) the perceptual dimensions that contribute to people's mental image of the robot stabilize over time (Paetzel et al, 2020;Paetzel-Prüsmann et al, 2021). Hence, besides investigating the role of gaze patterns in a joint task with a focus on engagement, in this paper, we also focus on understanding how mutual gaze in a social chat develops over time within and between interaction sessions and how it relates to people's perception of the robotic interaction partner.…”

Stereotypical nationality representations in HRI: perspectives from international young adults

“…Note that this appears to differ from studies in humanhuman interaction that indicate that first impressions are often maintained even after longer interactions. However, this effect may be reversed when it comes to social robots (Paetzel and Castellano, 2019;Paetzel et al, 2020). A related interpretation could be that the evaluation of individual components of a social robot, i.e., voice and appearance separately such as in the online survey, makes differences in these components stand out and trigger stereotypical perceptions, but when combined together with other elements in the interaction, the perception of these individual factors is overshadowed by the overall experience of the interaction and the ratings instead reflect their overall assessment of the interaction to different questionnaire questions.…”

“…It should be noted that these hypotheses are formulated in order to formalise the study, rather than signalling expectations regarding the results, since previous work have indicated, e.g., that users' perception of an agent may change between first impression and a longer interaction (Paetzel and Castellano, 2019;Paetzel et al, 2020) and that subjects may-or may not-be more positive towards an agent that is portrayed as having their own nationality (see Section 3).…”

“…Since participants of the online survey had shorter time exposure to the voice/appearance of the virtual robot, compared to those interacting with a physical robot, it is likely that the former evaluations corresponded to immediate, possibly unreliable, first impressions (Cafaro et al, 2012). Research in agent and robot interaction has demonstrated that first impressions are not consistent and could be altered with longer interactive exposure (Paetzel and Castellano, 2019;Paetzel et al, 2020;Paetzel-Prüsmann et al, 2021). However, an additional difference exists in the online survey introducing a virtual robot and robot study having a physical.…”