Impression Conveyance with Responsive Robot Gaze in a Conversational Situtation

In face-to-face communication, eyes play a central role, for example, in directing attention and regulating turn-taking. For this reason, the eyes have been a central topic in several fields of interaction study. Although many psychological findings have encouraged previous work in both human-computer and human-robot interaction studies, so far there have been few explorations on how to move the agent´s eye, including when to move it, for communication. Therefore, we investigate this topic in this study. The impression a person forms from an interaction is strongly influenced by the degree to which their partner´s gaze direction correlates with their own. In this paper, we evaluate two primitive ways of controlling a robot´s gaze responsively to its partner´s gaze by comparison with two additional ways of non-responsive gaze control in an experiment set in a conversational situation. Consequently, we confirm that robots with different types of responsive gaze control can give subjects different impressions of its characteristics