Perception of Culture-specific Gaze Behaviors of Agents and Gender Effects

Gaze plays an important role in human-human communication. Adequate gaze control of a virtual agent is also essential for successful and believable human-agent interaction. Researchers on HAI have developed gaze control models by taking account of gaze duration, frequency, and timing of gaze aversion. However, cultural differences in gaze behaviors have not been focused enough. We aimed to investigate cultural differences in gaze behaviors and their perception by developing virtual agents with Japanese gaze behaviors, American gaze behaviors, and fixed gaze behaviors. We then compared their effects on the impressions of the agents and interactions. Our first experimental results with Japanese participants suggested that the impression of the agent is affected by participants' shyness and familiarity of the gaze patterns performed by the agent. This paper reports the results of our second experiment that investigated the effects of the gender of agents and the gender of participants on perception of culture-specific gaze behaviors. The preliminary results suggests there are differences between the gender of participants and agents on the perception of favorable gaze behaviors. The female participants had a better impression on the agent of the same gender that performed the American gaze behavior, while the male participants preferred the agents with the Japanese gaze behavior. These results indicate favorable gaze behaviors vary according to users' gender and agents' gender.