Coordinating turn-taking and talking in multi-party conversations by controlling robot´s eye-gaze

In this study, we suggest a method to coordinate turn-taking and talking in multi-party conversations by the gaze of a robot that participates on the side. Also, we use the experimental paradigm named “Cooperative Turn-taking Game in Non-verbal Situation”, which is a simplified multi-party conversation environment. We investigated whether designing eye-gazes for such robots can coordinate turn-taking and talking in multi-party conversations, and we found the robot´s gaze could coordinate turn-taking and talking in multi-party conversations. Our study is expected to effectively encourage desirable talking in such multi-party conversations as collaborative learning scenes.