e Design of Gaze Behavior for Social Robots

Humanlike robots are designed to communicate using human verbal and nonverbal language and engage in conversations with people where social gaze cues play an important role. While research in human-robot interaction has shown that people understand these cues and interpret them as valid signals for human communication, whether social gaze cues can serve as an effective communicative mechanism that leads to significant social outcomes remains unknown. Furthermore, work in this area lacks theoretical and empirical foundations for the design of communicative mechanisms to work with the human communicative system. e main research questions in this problem space are as follows: What are the design variables for social gaze behavior? How do we design gaze behavior for social robots? Can designed behaviors lead to positive, significant social outcomes in human-robot interaction such as better learning, stronger affiliation, and active participation in conversations? is dissertation seeks to find answers to these questions through (1) exploring the design space to identify design variables for social gaze, (2) adapting an approach based on modeling human behavior to designing robot behaviors, and (3) evaluating the social outcome of designed behaviors in three studies that focus on different functions of social gaze behavior. Study I focused on designing gaze behavior for communication of attention and found strong learning effects induced by a simple manipulation of how much a robot looks at one person more than the other. Study II looked at how different patterns of a robot’s gaze behavior lead to different levels of participation in a conversation with the robot and found strong effects of gaze cues in behavioral and subjective measures of participation, attentiveness, liking, and feelings of groupness. ese studies will be followed by a proposed third study that will look at how cues from a robot’s gaze might be used in establishing joint attention and evaluate how changes in the robot’s gaze at objects affect foreign language learning. is research will contribute to (1) the design of robotic systems with a set of design variables for social gaze and a theoretically and empirically grounded methodology for the design of communicative mechanisms for social technology and (2) human communication research with a deeper understanding of how human communicative mechanisms respond to artificially created social stimuli.