Affective communication robot partners using associative memory with mood congruency effects

Abstract

Associative memory is one of the significant and effective functions in communication. Conventionally, several types of artificial associative memory models have been de-veloped. In the field of psychology, it is known that human memory and emotions are closely related each other, such as the mood-congruency effects. In addition, emotions are sensitive to sympathy for facial expressions of communication partners. In this paper, we develop the emotional models for the robot partners, and propose an interactive robot system with a complex-valued bidirectional associative memory model that associations are affected by emotional factors. We utilize multi-modal information such as gesture and facial expressions to generate emotional factors. The results of interactive communication experiment show that there is a possibility to provide the suitable information for the interactive space.