Power of looking together: an analysis of social facilitation by Agent's mutual gaze

Abstract

The authors investigated the effect of gaze tracking of humans by an agent. Psychological studies have shown that the presence of others facilitates task with implying partnership. This effect also occurs if the presence of others is replaced with a robot. Furthermore, the previous research showed that being touched by a robot motivates a person. However, direct contact such as the touch of a robot has a risk of disturbing human work. The authors used gaze tracking for social facilitation because gaze tracking can also facilitate human efforts and implemented a social facilitation robot agent by using gaze tracking. The agent projects its face on a surface to show quickly changing expressions, which is difficult to achieve with ordinary robots. The agent can also express gaze tracking by implementing eye trackers. The authors prepared three conditions with monotonous tasks to compare the effects of gaze tracking: the agent gazes at the instructed point moves its gaze randomly and traces the gaze point of a participant. The results showed that the participants’ motivation increased if the agent is tracking gazed point by a human, even though there are no differences between the achievement scores of the task and the continuation time.

Keywords

• eye
• psychology
• behavioural sciences computing
• gaze tracking
• human-robot interaction
• gazed point
• mutual gaze
• gaze tracking
• social facilitation robot agent
• agent gazes
• monotonous tasks
• eye trackers