30. July 2021 : Investigating potential differences in the interaction between humans and humans vs. humans and robots

Czeszumski A, Gert AL, Keshava A, Ghadirzadeh A, Kalthoff T, Ehinger BV, Tiessen M, Björkman M, Kragic D and König P (2021)
Coordinating with a robot partner affects action monitoring related neural processing.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.03.26.437133
bioRxiv

Robots play an increasing role in multiple areas of our social life, and coordinated interaction between humans and robots will become more and more important.
In our study we aimed at understanding obvious behavioural differences in human-human and human-robot interactions from a neurophysiological perspective.
Our 16 participants held two corners of a tablet while collaboratively guiding a ball around a circular track either with another participant or a robot.
Deliberately triggered pertubations of the ball in irregular intervals created artifical errors in the behaviour and required corrective measures, which were concurrently recorded by electroencephalography (EEG).
We found a significant difference between human and robot partners: human participants treated errors during human-robot interaction differently from those made during interactions with other humans.
All in all, our exploratory study suggests that coordinating with robots affects action monitoring related processing.