Perception of Affective Body Movements in HRI across Age Groups: Comparison between Results from Denmark and Japan

Social robots are envisioned to move into unrestricted environments where they will be interacting with naive users (in terms of their experience as robot operators). Thus, these robots are also envisioned to exploit interaction channels that are natural to humans like speech, gestures, or body movements. A specificity of these interaction channels is that humans do not only convey task-related information but also more subtle information like e.g. Emotions or personal stance through these channels. Thus, to be successful and not accidentally jeopardizing an interaction, robots need to be able to understand these implicit connotations of the signals (often called social signal processing) in order to generate appropriate signals in a given interaction context. One main application area that is envisioned for social robots is related to elder care, but little is known on how seniors will perceive robots and the signals they produce. In this paper we focus on affective connotations of body movements and investigate how the perception of body movements of robots is related to age. Inspired by a study from Japan, we introduce culture as a variable in the experiment and discuss the difficulties of cross-cultural comparisons. The results show that there are certain age-related differences in the perception of affective body movements, but not as strong as in the original study. A follow up experiment puts the affective body movements into context and shows that recognition rates deteriorate for older participants.