Moving (together) matters: how synchrony shapes our interactional experience with social robots

When: 18 March 12.00 to 13.00

Where: Online

Speaker: Valentina Fantasia, Cognitive Science, Lund university

Moderator: Ellinor Blom Lussi, AI and Society, Lund Unversity

Spoken language: English

Abstract

Setting sailing together it's still a difficult task for humans in interaction with robots. As interactions with embodied artificial agents are increasing in public and private contexts, researchers have been grappling with investigating which robotic aspects contribute the most to how humans feel in interaction with those artificial companions.

The study I will present investigates how interactional synchrony between human participants and a social robot shapes the human affective experience with, and perception of the robot as a social partner. In human social encounters, synchrony – in its different forms - has long been recognised as a key ingredient in the making up of social relationships. At issue in this work is how interactional synchrony in a human-robot interaction develops over time, influencing  the human affective experience of interacting with the robot.

Our results indicate that for humans, establishing interactional synchrony was easy to achieve, from the very beginning, in interaction with another human, but less so with a humanoid robot. Additionally, linear models indicated that higher synchrony levels with the robot correlated with feeling more comfortable in the interaction.