Assessing the effect of persuasive robots interactive social cues on users’ psychological reactance, liking, trusting beliefs and compliance

Research in the field of social robotics suggests that enhancing social cues in robots can elicit more social responses in users. It is however not clear how users respond socially to persuasive social robots and whether such reactions will be more pronounced when the robots feature more interactive social cues. In the current research, we examine social responses towards persuasive attempts provided by a robot featuring different numbers of interactive social cues. A laboratory experiment assessed participants’ psychological reactance, liking, trusting beliefs and compliance toward a persuasive robot that either presented users with: no interactive social cues (random head movements and random social praises), low number of interactive social cues (head mimicry), or high number of interactive social cues (head mimicry and proper timing for social praise). Results show that a persuasive robot with the highest number of interactive social cues invoked lower reactance and was liked more than the robots in the other two conditions. Furthermore, results suggest that trusting beliefs towards persuasive robots can be enhanced by utilizing praise as presented by social robots in no interactive social cues and high number of interactive social cues conditions. However, interactive social cues did not contribute to higher compliance

Assessing the effect of persuasive robots interactive social cues on users’ psychological reactance, liking, trusting beliefs and compliance

Research in the field of social robotics suggests that enhancing social cues in robots can elicit more social responses in users. It is however not clear how users respond socially to persuasive social robots and whether such reactions will be more pronounced when the robots feature more interactive social cues. In the current research, we examine social responses towards persuasive attempts provided by a robot featuring different numbers of interactive social cues. A laboratory experiment assessed participants’ psychological reactance, liking, trusting beliefs and compliance toward a persuasive robot that either presented users with: no interactive social cues (random head movements and random social praises), low number of interactive social cues (head mimicry), or high number of interactive social cues (head mimicry and proper timing for social praise). Results show that a persuasive robot with the highest number of interactive social cues invoked lower reactance and was liked more than the robots in the other two conditions. Furthermore, results suggest that trusting beliefs towards persuasive robots can be enhanced by utilizing praise as presented by social robots in no interactive social cues and high number of interactive social cues conditions. However, interactive social cues did not contribute to higher compliance

Effects of robot facial characteristics and gender in persuasive human-robot interaction

The growing interest in social robotics makes it relevant to examine the potential of robots as persuasive agents and, more specifically, to examine how robot characteristics influence the way people experience such interactions and comply with the persuasive attempts by robots. The purpose of this research is to identify how the (ostensible) gender and the facial characteristics of a robot influence the extent to which people trust it and the psychological reactance they experience from its persuasive attempts. This paper reports a laboratory study where SociBot™, a robot capable of displaying different faces and dynamic social cues, delivered persuasive messages to participants while playing a game. In-game choice behavior was logged, and trust and reactance toward the advisor were measured using questionnaires. Results show that a robotic advisor with upturned eyebrows and lips (features that people tend to trust more in humans) is more persuasive, evokes more trust, and less psychological reactance compared to one displaying eyebrows pointing down and lips curled downwards at the edges (facial characteristics typically not trusted in humans). Gender of the robot did not affect trust, but participants experienced higher psychological reactance when interacting with a robot of the opposite gender. Remarkably, mediation analysis showed that liking of the robot fully mediates the influence of facial characteristics on trusting beliefs and psychological reactance. Also, psychological reactance was a strong and reliable predictor of trusting beliefs but not of trusting behavior. These results suggest robots that are intended to influence human behavior should be designed to have facial characteristics we trust in humans and could be personalized to have the same gender as the user. Furthermore, personalization and adaptation techniques designed to make people like the robot more may help ensure they will also trust the robot.</p

Effects of Robot Facial Characteristics and Gender in Persuasive Human-Robot Interaction

The growing interest in social robotics makes it relevant to examine the potential of robots as persuasive agents and, more specifically, to examine how robot characteristics influence the way people experience such interactions and comply with the persuasive attempts by robots. The purpose of this research is to identify how the (ostensible) gender and the facial characteristics of a robot influence the extent to which people trust it and the psychological reactance they experience from its persuasive attempts. This paper reports a laboratory study where SociBot™, a robot capable of displaying different faces and dynamic social cues, delivered persuasive messages to participants while playing a game. In-game choice behavior was logged, and trust and reactance toward the advisor were measured using questionnaires. Results show that a robotic advisor with upturned eyebrows and lips (features that people tend to trust more in humans) is more persuasive, evokes more trust, and less psychological reactance compared to one displaying eyebrows pointing down and lips curled downwards at the edges (facial characteristics typically not trusted in humans). Gender of the robot did not affect trust, but participants experienced higher psychological reactance when interacting with a robot of the opposite gender. Remarkably, mediation analysis showed that liking of the robot fully mediates the influence of facial characteristics on trusting beliefs and psychological reactance. Also, psychological reactance was a strong and reliable predictor of trusting beliefs but not of trusting behavior. These results suggest robots that are intended to influence human behavior should be designed to have facial characteristics we trust in humans and could be personalized to have the same gender as the user. Furthermore, personalization and adaptation techniques designed to make people like the robot more may help ensure they will also trust the robot

Computational approaches to Explainable Artificial Intelligence: Advances in theory, applications and trends

Financiado para publicación en acceso aberto: Universidad de Granada / CBUA.[Abstract]: Deep Learning (DL), a groundbreaking branch of Machine Learning (ML), has emerged as a driving force in both theoretical and applied Artificial Intelligence (AI). DL algorithms, rooted in complex and non-linear artificial neural systems, excel at extracting high-level features from data. DL has demonstrated human-level performance in real-world tasks, including clinical diagnostics, and has unlocked solutions to previously intractable problems in virtual agent design, robotics, genomics, neuroimaging, computer vision, and industrial automation. In this paper, the most relevant advances from the last few years in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and several applications to neuroscience, neuroimaging, computer vision, and robotics are presented, reviewed and discussed. In this way, we summarize the state-of-the-art in AI methods, models and applications within a collection of works presented at the 9th International Conference on the Interplay between Natural and Artificial Computation (IWINAC). The works presented in this paper are excellent examples of new scientific discoveries made in laboratories that have successfully transitioned to real-life applications.Funding for open access charge: Universidad de Granada / CBUA. The work reported here has been partially funded by many public and private bodies: by the MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/ and FEDER “Una manera de hacer Europa” under the RTI2018-098913-B100 project, by the Consejeria de Economia, Innovacion, Ciencia y Empleo (Junta de Andalucia) and FEDER under CV20-45250, A-TIC-080-UGR18, B-TIC-586-UGR20 and P20-00525 projects, and by the Ministerio de Universidades under the FPU18/04902 grant given to C. Jimenez-Mesa, the Margarita-Salas grant to J.E. Arco, and the Juan de la Cierva grant to D. Castillo-Barnes. This work was supported by projects PGC2018-098813-B-C32 & RTI2018-098913-B100 (Spanish “Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacón y Universidades”), P18-RT-1624, UMA20-FEDERJA-086, CV20-45250, A-TIC-080-UGR18 and P20 00525 (Consejería de econnomía y conocimiento, Junta de Andalucía) and by European Regional Development Funds (ERDF). M.A. Formoso work was supported by Grant PRE2019-087350 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 by “ESF Investing in your future”. Work of J.E. Arco was supported by Ministerio de Universidades, Gobierno de España through grant “Margarita Salas”. The work reported here has been partially funded by Grant PID2020-115220RB-C22 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and, as appropriate, by “ERDF A way of making Europe”, by the “European Union” or by the “European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR”. The work of Paulo Novais is financed by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT - Fundaça̋o para a Ciência e a Tecnologia within project DSAIPA/AI/0099/2019. Ramiro Varela was supported by the Spanish State Agency for Research (AEI) grant PID2019-106263RB-I00. José Santos was supported by the Xunta de Galicia and the European Union (European Regional Development Fund - Galicia 2014–2020 Program), with grants CITIC (ED431G 2019/01), GPC ED431B 2022/33, and by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (project PID2020-116201GB-I00). The work reported here has been partially funded by Project Fondecyt 1201572 (ANID). The work reported here has been partially funded by Project Fondecyt 1201572 (ANID). In [247], the project has received funding by grant RTI2018-098969-B-100 from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia Innovación y Universidades and by grant PROMETEO/2019/119 from the Generalitat Valenciana (Spain). In [248], the research work has been partially supported by the National Science Fund of Bulgaria (scientific project “Digital Accessibility for People with Special Needs: Methodology, Conceptual Models and Innovative Ecosystems”), Grant Number KP-06-N42/4, 08.12.2020; EC for project CybSPEED, 777720, H2020-MSCA-RISE-2017 and OP Science and Education for Smart Growth (2014–2020) for project Competence Center “Intelligent mechatronic, eco- and energy saving sytems and technologies”BG05M2OP001-1.002-0023. The work reported here has been partially funded by the support of MICIN project PID2020-116346GB-I00. The work reported here has been partially funded by many public and private bodies: by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and “ERDF A way to make Europe” under the PID2020-115220RB-C21 and EQC2019-006063-P projects; by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and “ESF Investing in your future” under FPU16/03740 grant; by the CIBERSAM of the Instituto de Salud Carlos III; by MinCiencias project 1222-852-69927, contract 495-2020. The work is partially supported by the Autonomous Government of Andalusia (Spain) under project UMA18-FEDERJA-084, project name Detection of anomalous behavior agents by DL in low-cost video surveillance intelligent systems. Authors gratefully acknowledge the support of NVIDIA Corporation with the donation of a RTX A6000 48 Gb. This work was conducted in the context of the Horizon Europe project PRE-ACT, and it has received funding through the European Commission Horizon Europe Program (Grant Agreement number: 101057746). In addition, this work was supported by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) under contract nummber 22 00058. S.B Cho was supported by Institute of Information & Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP) grant funded by the Korean government (MSIT) (No. 2020-0-01361, Artificial Intelligence Graduate School Program (Yonsei University)).Junta de Andalucía; CV20-45250Junta de Andalucía; A-TIC-080-UGR18Junta de Andalucía; B-TIC-586-UGR20Junta de Andalucía; P20-00525Junta de Andalucía; P18-RT-1624Junta de Andalucía; UMA20-FEDERJA-086Portugal. Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia; DSAIPA/AI/0099/2019Xunta de Galicia; ED431G 2019/01Xunta de Galicia; GPC ED431B 2022/33Chile. Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo; 1201572Generalitat Valenciana; PROMETEO/2019/119Bulgarian National Science Fund; KP-06-N42/4Bulgaria. Operational Programme Science and Education for Smart Growth; BG05M2OP001-1.002-0023Colombia. Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación; 1222-852-69927Junta de Andalucía; UMA18-FEDERJA-084Suíza. State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation; 22 00058Institute of Information & Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation (Corea del Sur); 2020-0-0136

E.I.: Multi-agent platform for development of educa-tional games for children with autism

Abstract-Multi-agent system of autonomous interactive blocks that can display its active state through color and light intensity has been developed. Depending on the individual rules, these autonomous blocks could express emergent behaviors which are a basis for various educational games. The multi-agent system is used for developing games for behavioral training of autistic children. This paper features the functional and electronic design of the individual blocks and transformation of the multi-agent system to a platform that allows multiple games to be designed through easy reprogramming of the blocks. Three game concepts that show the type of games that can easily be implemented and reprogrammed are described. The impact of this platform is shortly mentioned in the discussion. The initial tests of using the platform for various educational games are very positive. However, the results of user tests go beyond the scope of this paper and are not discussed in the text that follows. Keywords -multiagent interactive platform, tangible interaction, autism, game design

Crowd of Oz: a crowd-powered social robotics system for stress management

Coping with stress is crucial for a healthy lifestyle. In the past, a great deal of research has been conducted to use socially assistive robots as a therapy to alleviate stress and anxiety related problems. However, building a fully autonomous social robot which can deliver psycho-therapeutic solutions is a very challenging endeavor due to limitations in artificial intelligence (AI). To overcome AI’s limitations, researchers have previously introduced crowdsourcing-based teleoperation methods, which summon the crowd’s input to control a robot’s functions. However, in the context of robotics, such methods have only been used to support the object manipulation, navigational, and training tasks. It is not yet known how to leverage real-time crowdsourcing (RTC) to process complex therapeutic conversational tasks for social robotics. To fill this gap, we developed Crowd of Oz (CoZ), an open-source system that allows Softbank’s Pepper robot to support such conversational tasks. To demonstrate the potential implications of this crowd-powered approach, we investigated how effectively, crowd workers recruited in real-time can teleoperate the robot’s speech, in situations when the robot needs to act as a life coach. We systematically varied the number of workers who simultaneously handle the speech of the robot (N = 1, 2, 4, 8) and investigated the concomitant effects for enabling RTC for social robotics. Additionally, we present Pavilion, a novel and open-source algorithm for managing the workers’ queue so that a required number of workers are engaged or waiting. Based on our findings, we discuss salient parameters that such crowd-powered systems must adhere to, so as to enhance their performance in response latency and dialogue quality

Simulated trust : a cheap social learning strategy

Animals use heuristic strategies to determine from which conspecifics to learn socially. This leads to directed social learning. Directed social learning protects them from copying non-adaptive information. So far, the strategies of animals, leading to directed social learning, are assumed to rely on (possibly indirect) inferences about the demonstrator's success. As an alternative to this assumption, we propose a strategy that only uses self-established estimates of the pay-offs of behavior. We evaluate the strategy in a number of agent-based simulations. Critically, the strategy's success is warranted by the inclusion of an incremental learning mechanism. Our findings point out new theoretical opportunities to regulate social learning for animals. More broadly, our simulations emphasize the need to include a realistic learning mechanism in game-theoretic studies of social learning strategies, and call for re-evaluation of previous findings

Personalizing HRI in Musical Instrument Practicing: The Influence of Robot Roles (Evaluative Versus Nonevaluative) on the Child’s Motivation for Children in Different Learning Stages

Learning to play a musical instrument involves skill learning and requires long-term practicing to reach expert levels. Research has already proven that the assistance of a robot can improve children’s motivation and performance during practice. In an earlier study, we showed that the specific role (evaluative role versus nonevaluative role) the robot plays can determine children’s motivation and performance. In the current study, we argue that the role of the robot has to be different for children in different learning stages (musical instrument expertise levels). Therefore, this study investigated whether children in different learning stages would have higher motivation when assisted by a robot in different supporting roles (i.e., evaluative role versus nonevaluative role). We conducted an empirical study in a real practice room of a music school with 31 children who were at different learning stages (i.e., beginners, developing players, and advanced players). In this study, every child practiced for three sessions: practicing alone, assisted by the evaluative robot, or assisted by the nonevaluative robot (in a random order). We measured motivation by using a questionnaire and analyzing video data. Results showed a significant interaction between condition (i.e., alone, evaluative robot, and nonevaluative robot) and learning stage groups indicating that children in different learning stage groups had different levels of motivation when practicing alone or with an evaluative or nonevaluative robot. More specifically, beginners had higher persistence when practicing with the nonevaluative robot, while advanced players expressed higher motivation after practicing with a robot than alone, but no difference was found between the two robot roles. Exploratory results also indicated that gender might have an interaction effect with the robot roles on child’s motivation in music practice with social robots. This study offers more insight into the child-robot interaction and robot role design in musical instrument learning. Specifically, our findings shed light on personalization in HRI, that is, from adapting the role of the robot to the characteristics and the development level of the user