Let me tell you! Investigating the effects of robot communication strategies in advicegiving situations based on robot appearance, interaction modality, and distance

Abstract

Recent proposals for how robots should talk to people when they give advice suggest that the same strategies humans employ with other humans are effective for robots as well. However, the evidence is exclusively based on people’s ob-servation of robot giving advice to other humans. Hence, it is not clear whether the results still apply when people actually participate in real interactions with robots. We ad-dress this shortcoming in a novel systematic mixed-methods study where we employ both survey-based subjective and brain-based objective measures (using functional near in-frared spectroscopy). The results show that previous results from observation conditions do not transfer automatically to interaction conditions, and that robot appearance and inter-action distance are important modulators of human percep-tions of robot behavior in advice-giving contexts