Perception of Social Behaviours in Robots

The paper presents three experiments about how people perceive simple behaviors in a social robot. Two populations, of very different ages and inhabiting specific environments, are asked to interact with a social robot across multiple days. The robot is made to behave according to different stances, commonly used in complex social behaviours, with small modifications introduced over time. Online questionnaires were used to collect data from which to analyze how the populations perceived the robot. The results obtained show that both populations were able to perceive small variations introduced in the behaviours. This is interesting as both populations have very different age distributions and, arguably, use different mental processes, hence suggesting that the sensitivity of perception is high across a wide range of ages. Moreover, this sensitivity is a guideline when designing complex social behaviours.