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The advisor robot: tracing people's mental model from a robot's physical attributes

Published: 02 March 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Humanoid robots offer many physical design choices such as voice frequency and head dimensions. We used hierarchical statistical mediation analysis to trace differences in people's mental model of robots from these choices. In an experiment, a humanoid robot gave participants online advice about their health. We used mediation analysis to identify the causal path from the robot's voice and head dimensions to the participants' mental model, and to their willingness to follow the robot's advice. The male robot voice predicted impressions of a knowledgeable robot, whose advice participants said they would follow. Increasing the voice's fundamental frequency reduced this effect. The robot's short chin length (but not its forehead dimensions) predicted impressions of a sociable robot, which also predicted intentions to take the robot's advice. We discuss the use of this approach for designing robots for different roles, when people's mental model of the robot matters.

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cover image ACM Conferences
HRI '06: Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCHI/SIGART conference on Human-robot interaction
March 2006
376 pages
ISBN:1595932941
DOI:10.1145/1121241
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 02 March 2006

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Author Tags

  1. dialogue
  2. gender
  3. human-robot interaction
  4. humanoids
  5. knowledge estimation
  6. mental model
  7. perception
  8. social robots

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HRI06
HRI06: International Conference on Human Robot Interaction
March 2 - 3, 2006
Utah, Salt Lake City, USA

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