A simple nod of the head: The effect of minimal robot movements on children's perception of a low-anthropomorphic robot

Zaga, Cristina; De Vries, Roelof AJ; Li, Jamy; Truong, Khiet P; Evers, Vanessa

Abstract

In this note, we present minimal robot movements for robotic technology for children. Two types of minimal gaze movements were designed: social-gaze movements to communicate social engagement and deictic-gaze movements to communicate task-related referential information. In a two (social-gaze movements vs. none) by two (deictic-gaze movements vs. none) video-based study (n=72), we found that social-gaze movements significantly increased children's perception of animacy and likeability of the robot. Deictic-gaze and social-gaze movements significantly increased children's perception of helpfulness. Our findings show the compelling communicative power of social-gaze movements, and to a lesser extent deictic-gaze movements, and have implications for designers who want to achieve animacy, likeability and helpfulness with simple and easily implementable minimal robot movements. Our work contributes to human-robot interaction research and design by providing a first indication of the potential of minimal robot movements to communicate social engagement and helpful referential information to children.

Citation

Zaga, C., De Vries, R. A., Li, J., Truong, K. P., & Evers, V. (2017, May). A simple nod of the head: The effect of minimal robot movements on children's perception of a low-anthropomorphic robot. Presented at CHI conference on human factors in computing systems, Denver, Colorado, USA

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: CHI conference on human factors in computing systems
• Start Date: May 6, 2017
• End Date: May 11, 2017
• Publication Date: 2017
• Deposit Date: Mar 20, 2025
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 336-341
• Book Title: CHI '17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• ISBN: 978-1-4503-4655-9
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025995
• Keywords: children, human-robot interaction design, non-anthropomorphic robot, nonverbal communication, robot behavior
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/4181090