Evaluating the influence of automatic attentional mechanisms in human-robot interaction

摘要

The human ability of unconsciously attending to social signals, together with other even more primitive automatic attentional processes, has been argued in the literature to play an important part in social interaction. In this paper, we will argue that the evaluation of the influence of these unconscious perceptual processes in social interaction with robots has been addressed in previous research in many cases in an ad hoc fashion, while, on the contrary, it should be tackled systematically, bridging more conventional measures from robotics with criteria stemming from ideas used in human studies in psychology, neuroscience and social sciences. We will start by establishing an experimental canvas that will limit complexity to a sustainable level, while still fostering adaptive behaviour and variability in interaction. We will then present a brief assessment of the criteria used in the HRI literature to study this particular type of experiments in order to evaluate success, followed by a suggestion of adaptation of other criteria used in human studies, which has only been sporadically and non-systematically performed in HRI research – in most cases, more as expression of future intents. We will conclude by proposing a methodology for this evaluation, to be applied in the project “Coordinated Attention for Social Interaction with Robots” sponsored by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT).