“Don’t Get Distracted!”: The Role of Social Robots’ Interaction Style on Users’ Cognitive Performance, Acceptance, and Non-Compliant Behavior

Abstract

Social robots are developed to provide companionship and assistance in the daily life of the children, older, and disable people but also have great potential as educational technology by facilitating learning. In these application areas, a social robot can take the role of a coach by training and assisting individuals also in cognitive tasks. Since a robot’s interaction style affects users’ trust and acceptance, customizing its behavior to the proposed tasks could, potentially, have an impact on the users’ performance. To investigate these phenomena, we enrolled sixty volunteers and endowed a social robot with a friendly and an authoritarian interaction style. The aim was to explore whether and how the robot’s interaction style could enhance users’ cognitive performance during a psychometric evaluation. The results showed that the authoritarian interaction style seems to be more appropriate to improve the performance when the tasks require high cognitive demands. These differences in cognitive performance between the groups did not depend on users’ intrinsic characteristics, such as gender and personality traits. Nevertheless, in the authoritarian condition, participants’ cognitive performance was related to their trust and the acceptance of the technology. Finally, we found that users’ non-compliant behavior was not related to their personality traits. This finding indirectly supports the role of the robot’s interaction style in influencing the compliance behavior of the users.

Robot Authority in Human-Robot Teaming: Effects of Human-Likeness and Physical Embodiment on Compliance

“…In addition, to our knowledge, no previous study has included an investigation of the influence of the Big Five personality factors on compliance to a robot in HRI and only one very recent one has used the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire Revised-Short (EPQR-S) to investigate personality traits and non-compliant behavior. However, Maggi et al (2020) have found no relation of users' non-compliant behavior to their personality traits. Therefore, across two studies we examined the effects of physical embodiment and humanlikeness of a robot in a situation where a participant was encouraged by a robotic "coach" to continue practicing a reconnaissance detection task.…”

Design, Manufacture, and Acceptance Evaluation of APO: A Lip-syncing Social Robot Developed for Lip-reading Training Programs

“…This test measures pleasure, arousal, and dominance concerned with the social robot [50]. Both questionnaires, UTAUT and SAM, were scored via Five-Likert pictorial scales (range:1-5) [48,57].…”

“…The current study comprises two experiments: evaluating the proposed lip-syncing system, which determines the robot's capacity to be employed in educational scenarios, and investigating the acceptance of the APO, which affects participants' cognitive performance and compliance behaviors during interaction with the robot [48]. In the first experiment, a video of a normal-hearing individual pronouncing a set of words was first given to a group of adults, who were asked to watch, identify, and write the pronounced words.…”

A Bayesian Framework for Learning Proactive Robot Behaviour in Assistive Tasks

“…Socially assistive robots (SAR) are designed to help vulnerable user populations, such as those who are undergoing rehabilitation, therapy, or require lifelong assistance. They can perform a variety of tasks, including reminding users to take medication (Di Napoli et al, 2023), encouraging physical activity (Fasola and Mataric, 2010), providing cognitive training (Maggi et al, 2021), and offering social and emotional support (Rossi et al, 2020). To account for the variability in tasks and users' behaviours, researchers are focusing on the role of the robot's adaptive behaviour.…”