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International audienceWe aim at addressing in this paper the issue of non-verbal communication involved in a human-robot interaction. We first propose a taxonomy of assistance that an operator may expect from a partner during a long object manipulation task. Then, this paper presents a method to detect which kind of robot assistance is needed, thanks to the decoding of haptic cues conveyed by the operator. An experimental study on thirty subjects moving a long object together with a robot that is providing an assistance is introduced. A statistical analysis highlights the relationships between haptic measures and intentions of motion. This analysis shows that wrench measurements constitute an incomplete information to detect the operator's intention of motion

Recent results from Cannon, Hayes, and Tipper (2010) have established that the Action Compatibility Effect (ACE) is hedonically marked and elicits a genuine positive reaction. In this work, we aim to show that the hedonic marking of the ACE has incidental consequences on affective judgment. For this, we used the affective priming paradigm principle (for a review, see Musch & Klauer, 2003): participants have to respond, as quickly as they can, regarding the pleasantness or unpleasantness character of a target word. In the priming phase, we do not present an affective stimulus; however, we present two different graspable objects, one after the other. The handles of the graspable objects are shown either both on the same side (i.e., perceptual action compatibility) or not (i.e., perceptual action incompatibility). In addition, the orientation of the handles of the objects are either compatible (i.e., action compatibility) or not (i.e., action compatibility) with the response hand used for the word evaluation. Consistent with our hypothesis, participants responded faster to positive words after perceptual action compatibility and action compatibility (thus demonstrating the ACE) than after incompatibility conditions.

The concept of motor fluency, defined as the positive marking associated with the easy realisation of a movement, is used to explain the various compatibility effects observed between emotional valence and lateral space. In this work, we propose that these effects arise from the motor fluency simulation induced by emotionally positive stimuli. In a perceptual line bisection task (Landmark task) we primed each trial with an emotionally positive word, negative word, neutral word or no word before asking participants to verbally indicate the side of the vertical mark on the horizontal line (Experiment 1) or to indicate the longest side of the line (Experiment 2). After positive words and for bisected lines, participants' responses were biased towards their dominant side for both right- and left-handers and similarly under the two different instructions. As movements of the dominant hand or in the dominant hemispace have been described as the most fluent lateral actions, this result supports our hypothesis that positive stimuli induce a mental simulation of fluent lateral movements. Furthermore, the replication of the effect under opposite instructions between the two experiments is in line with an explanation in terms of a bias in response selection rather than variations in perceptual content.