How a Robot’s Attention Shapes The Way People Teach.
Yukie Nagai, Akiko Nakatani, Minoru Asada · 2010
We address the question of how a robot’s attention shapes the way people teach. When demonstrating a task to a robot, human part-ners often emphasize important aspects of the task by modifying their body movement as caregivers do toward infants. This phe-nomenon has recently been investigated in de-velopmental robotics; however, what causes such action modification is yet unrevealed. This paper presents an experiment examin-ing influences that a robot’s attention has on task demonstration of human partners. Our hypothesis is that a robot’s bottom-up atten-tion based on visual salience induces partners to exaggerate their body movement, to seg-ment the movement frequently, to approach closely to the robot, and so on, which are ho-mologous to modifications in infant-directed action. We present quantitative results sup-porting our hypothesis and discuss what prop-erties of bottom-up attention contribute to eliciting such action modifications. 1.