Sarah Gillet*, Ronald Cumbal*, André Pereira, José Lopes, Olov Engwall, Iolanda Leite (2021).
Robot Gaze Can Mediate Participation Imbalance in Groups with Different Skill Levels.
In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 2021, New York, NY, USA.
(HRI '21)
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Our paper on Robot Gaze Can Mediate Participation Imbalance in Groups with Different Skill Levels explores the question how robots can use group-dynamics-aware gaze behaviors to balance participation in skill-imbalanced groups. We designed a between-subject study with two conditions in which participants of different language skills, i.e. a learner and a native speaker, were invited to play a language-focused game Med andra ord. In this game, the task is to describe a given word with other words so that a third party can guess the given word. In our case the robot took the role of the guesser and participants were describing the words. Therefore, we expected that the different skills in language would be reflected in the participation behavior in the game.
During the game, the robot was perceiving the participation behavior of the two describing group members online. It then used this information on group dynamics to adjust its gaze to make room for the less active player (often the language learner) to try describing the words.
Our results indicate that the robot was successfull in balancing the interaction between the describing participants. Further, we could verify our expectation that different language abilities lead to according participation behavior in the game.
Want to get an idea about the gaze behaviors? Find the video here