Contagious Yawning in Human-Robot Interaction

Abstract

This late breaking report introduces an approach to measure yawning contagion between robots and humans. Understanding to what extent yawning can be contagious between robots and humans will help to generate more believable interaction behaviors for social robots and contribute to a better understanding of cognitive phenomena like empathy and their application in HRI. We will give an overview of an experiment which used an EMYS robot for the presentation of the yawning stimulus. We will present the results of our preliminary analysis of the collected data.