Emergence of joint attention between two robots and human using communication activity caused by synchronous behaviors

摘要

In this study, we investigate the effects of the emergence of joint attention in social interaction consisting of two robots and one person. Especially, we focus on synchronous behaviors of two robots and the degree of communication activity caused by their behaviors. We predict that when two robots communicate with each other using synchronous behaviors, the degree of communication activity between them is observed to become higher. Moreover, as a person close to two robots becomes easily involved in their communication, joint attention among them will emerge there when the robots turn their eyes to the person. For verifying this prediction, we conducted two experiments to investigate whether a direction of participants' eyes were guided by two robots' eyes and heads movements. Results of the experiments showed that when two robots gazed at a participant at the high degree of communication activity, the direction of his/her eyes was easily guided by two robots' eyes and heads movements.