Embodied social robots trigger gaze following in real-time HRI

When interacting with others, we use information from gestures, facial expressions and gaze direction to make inferences about what others think, feel or intend to do. Gaze direction also triggers shifts of attention to gazed-at locations and establishes joint attention between gazer and observer. The ability to follow gaze develops early in life and is a prerequisite for more complex social-cognitive processes like action perception, mentalizing and language acquisition. It has been shown that robot gaze induces similar gaze following effects in observers as human gaze, with positive effects on attitudes and performance in human-robot interaction. However, so far most studies have used images or videos in controlled laboratory settings to investigate gaze following in human-robot interaction rather than realistic social embodied robot platforms. The current experiment shows that gaze following can be observed in real-time interactions with embodied social robot platforms. The implications of this finding for human-robot interaction are discussed.