An adequate robot gaze control is essential for successful and natural human-robot interactions. In multi-party contexts, the effective use of the gaze shared among the participants may have a strong impact in keeping the participants' attention and obtaining a persuasive effect. To gain a deeper understanding of how the robot gaze behavior might influence and shape the human perception of the interaction and the decision-making process in small groups, we conducted a between-subjects experimental study using a humanoid robot in a movie recommendation scenario. Our results showed that different gaze behaviors resulted in different group acceptance rates if combined with the personal acceptance of the group members. However, users were not able to differentiate the behaviors in term of naturalness and persuasiveness. Moreover, results showed that other factors, such as the length of the recommendation, play a significant role in the users' perception of the interaction naturalness.
展开▼
