Representations of Proxemic Behavior for Human-Machine Interaction

We discuss representations of human spatial behavior (proxemics) in social encounters; specifically, we consider physical (distance and orientation), psychological (interagent relationship), and psychophysical (sensory experience) representations. We conducted a pilot study with two interacting participants and a physical obstruction initially limiting their perception of social stimuli. We compare two of three proxemics representations by training Hidden Markov Models on the collected data to recognize human transitions into (initiation) and out of (termination) the social interaction. Our findings demonstrate an improvement in recognition using the psychophysical proxemics representation over the more commonly used physical representation. Author

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