The presence of a humanoid robot can be detrimental to human performance in an attentional task

Abstract

AbstractBeing surrounded by others has enabled humans to optimize everyday life tasks, as the mere presence of others can improve performance in some daily tasks. At the same time, the presence of an audience can also be detrimental to an individual's performance. Still, it is unclear what happens when these “others” include artificial agents, such as robots. Literature has shown mixed results in understanding whether robots can be facilitators or distractors in joint tasks. To understand the impact that the presence of a robot might have on human attentional mechanisms, we designed a visual-search-based game that participants could play alone, under the surveillance of a humanoid robot, or in collaboration with it. Thirty-six participants completed this experiment (age = 26.44 ± 6.35, 10 males). Attentional processes were assessed using metrics of performance (i.e. search times), and eye-tracking (i.e. fixation duration and time to first fixation). Results showed that the presence of the robot negatively affected participants' performance in-game, with longer search times and time to first fixation when the robot was observing them. We hypothesize that the robot acted as a distractor, delaying the allocation of attentional resources to the task, potentially exerting monitoring pressure.