Investigating the Effects of Gaze Behavior on the Perceived Delay of a Robot's Response

Slow responses of social robots cause user frustration in human-robot communication. This paper investigates how far the gaze behavior of a robot, meaning the way the robot looks at its conversation partner, influences the perceived delay of a robot’s response in human-robot conversations. To enhance a natural conversation pattern, a gaze behavior was designed and implemented into a humanoid robot. A within-subject experiment involving 31 test subjects was designed with two conditions (with and without gaze behavior). The results generally show a positive correlation between the gaze behavior that the robot exhibits and the perceived responsiveness of the robot (in the condition with gaze behavior). However, the perceived responsiveness is the same in both conditions. One reason for this finding may be that the response time of the robot might have been generally too short to identify an effect in the experimental setting. Future research can directly build on our research to assess the relation between gaze behavior and perceived responsiveness in further detail and draw upon the finding that gaze behavior generally plays an important role with regard to the perceived responsiveness of a robot. Robot designers can also build on our research and consider both gaze behavior and additional factors to address a perceived delay in a robot’s response.

[1]  Tom Bruneau.  Communicative Silences: Forms and Functions , 1973 .

[2]  Dennis Kurzon,et al.  Discourse of silence , 1998 .

[3]  Anton Nijholt,et al.  Eye gaze patterns in conversations: there is more to conversational agents than meets the eyes , 2001, CHI.

[4]  Illah R. Nourbakhsh,et al.  The role of expressiveness and attention in human-robot interaction , 2002, Proceedings 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.02CH37292).

[5]  Illah R. Nourbakhsh,et al.  A survey of socially interactive robots , 2003, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[6]  J. Coupland,et al.  Small Talk: Social Functions , 2003 .

[7]  David G. Novick,et al.  Root causes of lost time and user stress in a simple dialog system , 2005, INTERSPEECH.

[8]  Dirk Heylen,et al.  Head Gestures, Gaze and the Principles of Conversational Structure , 2006, Int. J. Humanoid Robotics.

[9]  Takayuki Kanda,et al.  How Quickly Should a Communication Robot Respond? Delaying Strategies and Habituation Effects , 2009, Int. J. Soc. Robotics.

[10]  Takayuki Kanda,et al.  How to approach humans?-strategies for social robots to initiate interaction , 2009, 2009 4th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).

[11]  Petra Wagner,et al.  Gaze Patterns in Turn-Taking , 2012, INTERSPEECH.

[12]  Gabriel Skantze,et al.  Towards incremental speech generation in conversational systems , 2013, Comput. Speech Lang..

[13]  Sean Andrist,et al.  Conversational Gaze Aversion for Virtual Agents , 2013, IVA.

[14]  Marko Sarstedt,et al.  Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM): An emerging tool in business research , 2014 .

[15]  Kuanhao Zheng,et al.  Designing and Implementing a Human–Robot Team for Social Interactions , 2013, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems.

[16]  Naoki Mukawa,et al.  How do verbal/bodily fillers ease embarrassing situations during silences in conversations? , 2014, The 23rd IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication.

[17]  Jan Recker,et al.  Development and validation of an instrument to measure organizational cultures' support of Business Process Management , 2014, Inf. Manag..

[18]  Sean Andrist,et al.  Conversational Gaze Aversion for Humanlike Robots , 2014, 2014 9th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).

[19]  Naoki Mukawa,et al.  A conversational robot with vocal and bodily fillers for recovering from awkward silence at turn-takings , 2015, 2015 24th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN).

[20]  Raymond H. Cuijpers,et al.  Turn-yielding cues in robot-human conversation , 2015 .

[21]  Jonas Beskow,et al.  Look but Don't Stare: Mutual Gaze Interaction in Social Robots , 2017, ICSR.

[22]  Michita Imai,et al.  Investigating how people deal with silence in a human-robot conversation , 2017, 2017 26th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN).

[23]  Nicolas Monet,et al.  Context-aware selection of multi-modal conversational fillers in human-robot dialogues , 2017, 2017 26th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN).

[24]  David Schlangen,et al.  Beyond On-hold Messages: Conversational Time-buying in Task-oriented Dialogue , 2017, SIGDIAL Conference.

[25]  B. Scassellati,et al.  Social eye gaze in human-robot interaction , 2017, J. Hum. Robot Interact..

[26]  Sina Zarrieß,et al.  Testing Strategies For Bridging Time-To-Content In Spoken Dialogue Systems , 2018, IWSDS.