Influence of Eye Blink Mimicry and Interoceptive Awareness on Human-Robot Interaction

Abstract

As robots are increasingly employed in human society, establishing affective relationship between people and robots is very important. We examined whether eye blink mimicry by a robot and individual differences in interoceptive awareness influence the affective relationship between people and the robot or not. Our results demonstrated that neither of them was statistically related to the affective relationship. However, our closer analysis revealed that people tended to imitate the robot making eye blink and that spontaneous eye blink synchrony enhanced the rapport expectation with the robot. This finding provides a great insight into future design of HRI studies.