Author:
Mishra Chinmaya,Offrede Tom,Fuchs Susanne,Mooshammer Christine,Skantze Gabriel
Abstract
Gaze cues serve an important role in facilitating human conversations and are generally considered to be one of the most important non-verbal cues. Gaze cues are used to manage turn-taking, coordinate joint attention, regulate intimacy, and signal cognitive effort. In particular, it is well established that gaze aversion is used in conversations to avoid prolonged periods of mutual gaze. Given the numerous functions of gaze cues, there has been extensive work on modelling these cues in social robots. Researchers have also tried to identify the impact of robot gaze on human participants. However, the influence of robot gaze behavior on human gaze behavior has been less explored. We conducted a within-subjects user study (N = 33) to verify if a robot’s gaze aversion influenced human gaze aversion behavior. Our results show that participants tend to avert their gaze more when the robot keeps staring at them as compared to when the robot exhibits well-timed gaze aversions. We interpret our findings in terms of intimacy regulation: humans try to compensate for the robot’s lack of gaze aversion.
Funder
H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
Subject
Artificial Intelligence,Computer Science Applications
Reference44 articles.
1. Functions of gaze in social interaction: Communication and monitoring;Abele;J. Nonverbal Behav.,1986
2. Gaze aversion in conversational settings: An investigation based on mock job interview;Acarturk;J. Eye Mov. Res.,2021
3. Robot gaze does not reflexively cue human attention;Admoni,2011
4. Conversational gaze aversion for humanlike robots;Andrist,2014
5. Gaze and mutual gaze;Argyle;Br. J. Psychiatry,1976