Spiral response-cascade hypothesis — Intrapersonal responding-cascade in gaze interaction

A spiral response-cascade hypothesis is proposed to model the mechanism that enables human communication to emerge or be maintained among agents. In this hypothesis, we propose the existence of three cascades each of which indicates intrapersonal or interpersonal mutual facilitation in the formation of someone´s feelings about one´s communication partners and the exhibition of behaviors in communicating with them, i.e., responding. In this paper, we discuss our examination of an important part of the hypothesis, i.e., what we call an intrapersonal responding cascade, through an experiment where the gaze interactions between a participant and a communication robot were controlled not only by controlling the robot´s gaze but also by signaling participants when to shift their gaze. We report that the participants´ experiences in responding to the robot enable them to regard the robot as a communicative being, which partially supports the hypothesis of the intrapersonal responding cascade.