Robotic Gaze and Human Views

The main results reveal that on a behavioral level a low gaze aversion ratio leads to shorter interaction durations and that human participants change their own gaze aversion ratio to mimic the robot, however they do not copy the robotic gaze behavior strictly. Additionally, in the lowest gaze aversion setting, participants do not gaze back as much as expected, which indicates a user aversion to the robot gaze behavior.

However, participants do not report different attitudes toward the robot during the interaction for different gaze aversion ratios. To summarize, the urge of humans in conversational settings with a humanoid robot to adapt to the perceived gaze aversion ratio is stronger than the urge of intimacy regulation through gaze aversion and high mutual gaze is not always a sign of high comfort, as suggested earlier. This result can be used as a justification to deviate from human-inspired gaze parameters when it is necessary for specific robot behavior implementations.