Influences of inconsistency between phrases and postures of robots: A psychological experiment in Japan

To investigate influences of inconsistency on forms of information presentation by robots, a psychological experiment was conducted in Japan, with between-subject design for forty five university students. In the experiment, a small-sized humanoid robot performed self-introduction with polite/impolite postures and polite/impolite phrases in the utterances, in the Japanese cultural sense. The results revealed that: 1) the subjects under the inconsistent conditions (polite posture - impolite phrase condition or impolite posture - polite phrase condition) recalled less on the contents uttered by the robot than did those under the consistent conditions (polite posture - polite phrase condition or impolite posture - impolite phrase condition), and 2) there was only a low level of correlations between the recall scores of uttered contents and impressions of the robot. The paper discusses about implications from the results for future robotics design.