The Robot Eyes Don't Have It.The Presence of Eye Gaze on Collaborative Robots Yields Marginally Higher Human Trust But Lower Performance
26 Pages Posted: 27 Jan 2023
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The Robot Eyes Don't Have It.The Presence of Eye Gaze on Collaborative Robots Yields Marginally Higher Human Trust But Lower Performance
The Robot Eyes Don't Have It. The Presence of Eye Gaze on Collaborative Robots Yields Marginally Higher Human Trust but Lower Performance
Abstract
Eye gaze is a prominent feature of human social lives but little is known whether fitting eyes on machines makes humans trust them more. In this study we compared subjective and objective markers of human trust when collaborating with eyed and non-eyed robots of the same type. We used virtual reality scenes in which we manipulated distance and the presence of eyes on a robot’s display during simple collaboration scenes. We found that while collaboration with eyed cobots resulted in slightly higher subjective trust ratings, subjects’ objective markers like pupil size and task completion time indicated that collaborating with eyed robots is actually less comfortable. These findings fall in line with recent suggestions that anthropomorphism may be actually a detrimental feature of collaborative robots. They also show the complex relationship between human objective and subjective markers of trust when collaborating with artificial agents.
Keywords: collaborative robotics, anthropomorphism, human-robot collaboration, eye gaze
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