Tracking Gaze over Time in HRI as a Proxy for Engagement and Attribution of Social Agency

In this contribution, we describe a method of analysing and interpreting the direction and timing of a human's gaze over time towards a robot whilst interacting. Based on annotated video recordings of the interactions, this post-hoc analysis can be used to determine how this gaze behaviour changes over the course of an interaction, following from the observation that humans change their behaviour towards the robot on the time-scale of individual interactions. We posit that given these circumstances, this measure may be used as $a$ proxy (among others) for engagement in the interaction or the human's attribution of social agency to the robot. Application of this method to a sample of unstructured childrobot interactions demonstrates its use, and justifies its utilisation in future studies.