Karoline Malchus

Different gaze behavior in human-robot interaction in Asperger's syndrome: An eye-tracking study

Social robots are often applied in recreational contexts to improve the experience of using technical systems, but they are also increasingly used for therapeutic purposes. In this study, we compared how patients with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) interact with a social robot and a human actor. We examined the gaze behavior of nine ASD patients and 15 matched controls using a mobile eye-tracker. Participants performed a task in which they were required to follow the gaze of a robot or human actor. Our results show that ASD patients preferentially maintain eye contact during interaction with the social robot as compared to the human actor.

The role of emotional congruence in human-robot interaction

The communication of emotion is a crucial part of daily life interaction. Therefore, we carried out a study to research which role emotional congruence plays in human-human and human-robot interaction. In our results there is no effect of emotional incongruence between verbal content and facial expression of human as well as robotic stimuli on the cognitive performance in a story comprehension task. But more importantly, results indicate, that participants performance in a memorizing task is significantly better if the robot tells the story. Possible explanations will be discussed.

Web-based vs. controled environment: About the reliability of stimuli ratings in human-robot interaction

In several research areas, e.g. in the field of human-robot interaction, ratings or questionnaires are applied using offline and online methods. An argument for the use of online methods is the efficiency. By using the Internet, data can be collected much faster than in an offline experiment and the administration effort is very low. The goal of our study was to find out, if there is a difference in accuracy between an online and an offline rating task of human and robot emotional facial expressions. Results indicate, that emotional expressions are best recognized in humans (versus robots) and in the offline (versus online) condition. Furthermore, the influence of the emotional category on the accuracy rate varies between conditions. Therefore, we discuss environmental factors of online experiments that are difficult to control as main reasons for these results. We conclude that online rating studies should always be combined with more reliable offline evaluations.

Applications for emotional robots

In social interaction between humans, expressing, recognizing, and understanding emotions is essential [10]. In human interaction, emotions can influence both motivation and conversational content [7]. It is assumed that this is also true for human-robot interaction because social signals (like emotional expressions) produced by robots are processed in a similar manner as signals which are produced by humans. Therefore, artificial emotions are used in human-robot interaction (HRI) for several purposes. First of all, artificial emotions allow a robot to react in a more believable and natural manner [4]. Furthermore, artificial emotions can serve as a control mechanism [3] or can also be useful by providing feedback to the user about the robots internal states or goals [2].