Social Reflex Hypothesis on Blinking Interaction

An interactive artificial agent is supposed to be a feasible tool to reveal how humans recognize and respond to another’s response and should be developed through the investigation of the human cognitive mechanism. Previous studies have suggested that humans are sensitive to the responses of the interactant and might relate them to the interactant’s communicativeness. Following on from the findings of the previous studies, this paper presents the social reflex hypothesis on nonverbal responsive interaction, which refers to the social effect and origins of one’s unconscious response to the nonverbal behaviors of the interactant. To investigate the hypothesis, we conducted an experiment evaluating participants’ impression on an on-screen agent that could blink in response to the participant’s blinking. We found there was a non-linear relationship between the response latencies and the participants’ feeling of being looked at, which accorded with the hypothesis. The implications of the result and the further work on other aspects of the hypothesis were discussed.