Directing attention through gaze hints Improves task solving in human-humanoid interaction

Abstract

In this paper, we report an experimental study designed to examine how participants interpret and perceive social hints from gaze exhibited by either a robot or a human tutor when carrying out a matching task. The underlying notion is that knowing where an agent is looking provides cues that can direct attention, to an object of interest during a task. In this regard, we asked human participants to play a card matching game in the presence of either a human or a robotic tutor. In one case, the tutor gave hints to help the participant find the matching cards by gazing toward the correct match, in the other case, the tutor only looked at the participants and did not give them any help. The performance was measured based on the time and the number of tries taken to complete the game. Results show that gaze hints (helping tutor) made the matching task significantly easier (fewer tries) with the robot tutor. Furthermore, we found out that the robot's gaze hints were recognised significantly more often than the human tutor gaze hints, and consequently, the participants performed significantly better. The reported study provides new findings towards the use of non-verbal gaze hints in human-robot interaction, and lays out new design implications, especially for robots used for educative purposes.