The Importance of Mutual Gaze in Human-Robot Interaction

Mutual gaze is a key element of human development, and constitutes an important factor in human interactions. In this study, we examined –through analysis of subjective reports– the influence of an online eye-contact of a humanoid robot on humans’ reception of the robot. To this end, we manipulated the robot gaze, i.e., mutual (social) gaze and neutral (non-social) gaze, throughout an experiment involving letter identification. Our results suggest that people are sensitive to the mutual gaze of an artificial agent, they feel more engaged with the robot when a mutual gaze is established, and eye-contact supports attributing human-like characteristics to the robot. These findings are relevant both to the human-robot interaction (HRI) research - enhancing social behavior of robots, and also for cognitive neuroscience - studying mechanisms of social cognition in relatively realistic social interactive scenarios.