Eye Tracking Measures for Anthropomorphism in Human Robot Interaction
Anthropomorphism is our tendency to attribute human like characteristics to non-humans animate or inanimate. In this study, I had the task of analysing anthropomorphism via eye-gaze patterns as a human observed (i) human performing a task, vs, (ii) robot performing the same task.
We got exciting results, one being the validation of novelty effect, i.e. we tend to focus on a robot’s hands or legs while it performs a task, but when a human performs a task, we tend to focus on her head.
Report
Here is the full presentation discussing how the experiment was designed, how did the gaze data look like, what were the results and conclusions:
You can also read the full article here
As a reference, here are the 3 tasks that the robot performed in the experiment. Participants of the experiment were asked to watch these, while we were recording their eye-gaze data. A human then performed the same 3 tasks the experiment was accordingly repeated.
Robot, pick your favorite object!
Robot, point to crying baby!
Robot, dance!
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Dr. Pierre Dillenbourg who heads the CHILI lab at EPFL, and special thanks to my mentor Dr. Kshitij Sharma.