Humans socially attune to their “follower” robot

In this study, we examined if humans adapt their performance to delays in robot’s actions in a leader-follower interaction scenario. Participants were asked to “teach” a sequence of musical tones to the iCub robot. The robot repeated the sequence with decreasing delay between its own taps and taps performed by the participants. We observed that mean period of participants’ tapping behavior was affected by the iCub’s performance. This suggests that humans are sensitive to subtle parameters in robot’s behavior and they adapt to them in leader-follower contexts