Humanoid Attitudes Influence Humans in Video and Live Interactions

During social interactions, actions can be performed with different forms as a function of the mood driving them. These action forms i.e. vitality forms (VFs), have a strong influence in human interactions allowing people to immediately understand the attitude of others. Moreover, it has been demonstrated that the gentle and rude VFs expressed by a human agent influence the motor behavior of the receiver. An intriguing issue to investigate was to assess whether and how a humanoid agent, able to generate VFs, may induce the same contagion effect on the human partner. To this purpose we carried out a kinematic experiment investigating the motor behavior of participants in response to actions (taking request) performed by the iCub robot with different VFs in video and live interactive contexts. During the experiment, participants were required to pay attention to the iCub robot request and subsequently to place a ball on a specific target. Results indicate that: a) vitality forms conveyed by the iCub robot influenced the motor response of participants, modulating some kinematic parameters; b) this effect was obtained for both video and live interactive contexts; c) this effect was significantly greater in the video session compared to the live one.