Biased Attention Near iCub's Hand After Collaborative HRI

Earlier research has indicated that humans prioritize attention to the space close to their hands, commonly known as the "near-hand effect". This phenomenon also extends to a human partner's hand, but specifically following a shared physical joint action. Consequently, within human dyads, collaborative interaction results in a shared body representation that might impact fundamental attentional mechanisms. Our project investigates whether a similar effect can emerge from a human-robot interaction scenario. In previous work, we have shown that the mere presence of an anthropomorphic robot's hand is not enough to trigger the near-hand effect. Here, we designed an experiment to assess whether a collaborative human-robot interaction with the humanoid robot iCub could bias human attention toward the robot's hand. After the interaction, we replicated a classical psychological paradigm by adding a robotic condition to measure this attentional bias (i.e., the near-hand effect). Our findings indicate the existence of a near-hand effect triggered by the robot's hand, suggesting that HRI can replicate a shared body representation similar to that observed in human dyads, which may influence our basic attentional mechanisms.