Does the appearance of a robot affect users´ ways of giving Commands and feedback?

Our study compares users´ interaction with a humanoid robot and a dog-shaped pet-robot. We conducted a user study in which the participants had to teach object names as well as simple commands to either the humanoid or the pet-robot and give feedback to the robot for correct and incorrect performance. While we found, that the way of uttering commands rather depends on personal preference than on the robots´ appearance, the way of giving positive and negative feedback differed significantly between both robots: We found that for the pet-robot users gave reward in a similar way as giving reward to a real dog by touching it and commenting on its performance by uttering feedback like “well done” or “that was right”. For the humanoid, users typically did not use touch as a reward and rather used personal expressions like “thank you” to praise the robot. Our findings suggest that users actually rely to some degree on the appearance of a robot as a cue for deciding how to interact with it.