Interaction Studies - Volume 20, Issue 2, 2019

The use of robots had already been proven to encourage the promotion of social interaction and skills lacking in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), who typically have difficulties in recognizing facial expressions and emotions. The main goal of this research is to study the influence of a humanoid robot to develop socio-emotional skills in children with ASD. The children’s performance in game scenarios aiming to develop facial expressions recognition skills is presented. Along the sessions, children who performed the game scenarios with the robot and the experimenter had a significantly better performance than the children who performed the game scenarios without the robot. The main conclusions of this research support that a humanoid robot is a useful tool to develop socio-emotional skills in the intervention of children with ASD, due to the engagement and positive learning outcome observed.

Previous research has shown that the perception that one’s partner is investing effort in a joint action can generate a sense of commitment, leading participants to persist longer despite increasing boredom. The current research extends this finding to human-robot interaction. We implemented a 2-player version of the classic snake game which became increasingly boring over the course of each round, and operationalized commitment in terms of how long participants persisted before pressing a ‘finish’ button to conclude each round. Participants were informed that they would be linked via internet with their partner, a humanoid robot. Our results reveal that participants persisted longer when they perceived what they believed to be cues of their robot partner’s effortful contribution to the joint action. This provides evidence that the perception of a robot partner’s effort can elicit a sense of commitment to human-robot interaction.

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) reduce one’s ability to act appropriately in social situations. Increasing evidence indicates that children with ASD might ignore nonverbal social cues that usually aid social interaction because they do not recognize or understand them. We asked children with ASD to color an augmented reality coloring book (ARCB) to teach them how to recognize and understand some specific social signals and to ignore others. ARCB materials teach children to recognize and understand social signals in various ways. They can, for example, view 3D animations of the ARCB materials on a tablet computer. Thus, the ARCB can be used to help children with ASD focus their attention on the meaning and social value of nonverbal behaviors in specific social situations. The ARCB has multiple functions: it extends the social features of the story, and it restricts attention to the most important parts of the videos. Single-subject research with a multiple-baselines across-subject design was used in this study. After five weeks of ARCB training intervention, all 3 participants’ scores rose significantly and dramatically during the intervention phase (mean rate of correct answers improved from 14.24% to 47.33%), and remained significantly higher in the maintenance phase than at baseline. We conclude that coloring pictures of social situations may help children with ASD recognize and better understand these situations.

What determines if the first interaction between strangers will be a pleasant experience? We conducted an experiment to investigate the extent to which the perceived quality of an interaction is influenced by conversation content and context, and we document the physiological changes that are likely to play a role in establishing rapport. Females who did not know each other met in pairs and conducted a gossip- or creativity task, either face-to-face or online. The conversation content had no effect on the quality of online interactions. However in the face-to-face condition gossip was associated with better interaction quality. Tonic electrodermal activity steadily declined throughout the interaction, while phasic electrodermal activity first peaked and then returned to baseline. Neither were related to perceived interaction quality. Heart rate variability (HRV) dropped at first but then remained stable. A smaller drop in HRV drop corresponded to higher ratings of rapport and liking. Together these results suggest that gossip can improve the quality of a face-to-face interaction between strangers, and support the conjecture that parasympathetic activity is a marker of human openness to social engagement.

The Internet of things (IoT) affords people plenty of opportunities and a higher quality of life as well as drives a huge amount of data. By drawing on the concept of affordances, this study examines the user experience of personal informatics focusing on the technological and affective nature of affordance. A multi-mixed approach is used by combining qualitative methods and a quantitative survey. Results of the qualitative methods revealed a series of factors that related to the affordance of personal informatics, whereas results of the user model confirmed a significant role for connectivity, control, and synchronicity affordance regarding their underlying link to other variables, namely, expectation, confirmation, and satisfaction. The experiments showed that users’ affordances are greatly influenced by personal traits with interactivity tendency. The findings imply the embodied cognition process of personal informatics in which technological qualities are shaped by users’ perception, traits, and context. The results establish a foundation for wearable technologies through a heuristic quality assessment tool from a user embodied cognitive process. They confirm the validity and utility of applying affordances to the design of IoT as a useful concept, as well as prove that the optimum mix of affordances is crucial to the success or failure of IoT design.

This article studies the formats Do we X, Should/Shall we X, and Let’s X in order to deepen our understanding of face-to-face collaborative interactions at the computer. We use 6 hours of data of university students collaborating in British and American English, and our methodology is Conversation Analysis. We demonstrate that the participants display and orient to the immediacy/remoteness of the task, as well as their entitlement to carry out the proposed task, when they put forward a proposed action. To do so, they use specific formats, specific verbs, and display specific tasks depending on their needs, emerging from the unfolding of the collaboration. We argue that collaboration is not only a matter of organising the accomplishment of a set of tasks, but also of displaying what kind of task is being proposed, and to what extent the speaker is entitled to the proposed task.

Mating activity of a wild Mueller’s gibbon group (Hylobates muelleri) was observed in the Danum Valley Conservation Area, Sabah, Malaysia. The purpose of this study was to investigate the function of copulation calls in gibbons. The female emitted copulation calls at the time of intromission and pelvic thrusting. Copulation calls were composed of two notes and one of them was sung only while mating. Approximately half of copulation calls were sung near the range boundary. Mating with copulation calls sometimes occurred while singing. According to the model that female copulation calls have evolved under the selective pressures of risk of infanticide and sperm competition, copulation calls should be rare in species with little female promiscuity. As gibbons usually live in pair-living social organization and have a monogamous mating system, no vocal signals by female gibbons are considered to be needed. However, clear copulation calls were emitted by the female. It suggests that the relationship between paired gibbons is unstable. Copulation calls by the female Mueller’s gibbon may function to increase mate guarding and strengthen the pair bond.

Four studies examined 15- to 16-month-olds’ imitation of a model’s novel action with a familiar or an unfamiliar object. The infants observed a reliable or an unreliable model demonstrating a novel action with the object in a solitary observational (Study 1, 44 infants; Study 3, 40 infants) or in an interactive (Study 2, 48 infants; Study 4, 44 infants) context. The model’s reliability was manipulated by having the model acting competently or incompetently with different familiar objects. In two out of four studies infants imitated the model’s behavior when the model had previously shown to be reliable than when the model had been unreliable. The infants’ motivation to imitate was related to whether the reliable model interacted with the infants during object demonstration. More infants imitated the reliable model, who demonstrated the objects while interacting with the infants, than the reliable model who behaved in a disinterested manner during object demonstration.