Exploring effects of educational backgrounds and gender in human-robot interaction

Abstract

Recent Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research has focused on human factors. To deepen the exploration of human factors in HRI, research has also investigated humans' educational backgrounds and gender, and the gender assignment of robots. In a psychological experiment, robot gender was assigned only by the name of the robot and a brief verbal instruction by the experimenters. The results showed that subjects with educational backgrounds of natural science and technology had stronger impressions toward the robot than did those of a social science background. Additionally, the perceived robot femininity and one of the impressions positively influenced the recall task scores of the robot's utterances, in particular in male samples.