A Three-Site Reproduction of the joint Simon Effect with the NAO Robot

The generalizability of empirical research depends on the reproduction of findings across settings and populations. Consequently, generalizations demand resources beyond that which is typically available to any one laboratory. With collective interest in the joint Simon effect (JSE)-a phenomenon that suggests people work more effectively with humanlike (as opposed to mechanomorphic) robots -we pursued a multi-institutional research cooperation between robotics researchers, social scientists, and software engineers. To evaluate the robustness of the JSE in dyadic human-robot interactions, we constructed an experimental infrastructure for exact, lab-independent reproduction of robot behavior. Deployment of our infrastructure across three institutions with distinct research orientations (well-resourced versus resource-constrained) provides initial demonstration of the success of our approach and the degree to which it can alleviate technical barriers to HRI reproducibility. Moreover, with the three deployments situated in culturally distinct contexts (Germany, the U.S. Midwest, and the Mexico-U.S. Border), observation of a JSE at each site provides evidence its generalizability across settings and populations. CCS CONCEPTS •Human-centered computing →Empirical studies in HCI. ACM Reference Format: Megan Strait, Florian Lier, Jasmin Bernotat, Sven Wachsmuth, Friederike Eyssel, Robert Goldstone, and Selma Šabanović. 2020. A Three-Site Reproduction of the Joint Simon Effect with the NAO Robot. In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM/IEEE Intemational Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI ’ 20), March 23-26, 2020, Cambridge, United Kingdom. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3319502.3374783