Effects of responding to, initiating and ensuring joint attention in human-robot interaction

Inspired by the developmental timeline of joint attention in humans, we propose a conceptual model of joint attention with three parts: responding to joint attention, initiating joint attention, and ensuring joint attention.We conduct two experiments to investigate effects of joint attention in human-robot interaction. The first experiment explores the effects of responding to joint attention. We show that a robot responding to joint attention improves task performance and is perceived as more competent and socially interactive. The second experiment studies the importance of ensuring joint attention in human-robot interaction.We find that a robot's ensuring joint attention behavior is judged as having better performance in human-robot interactive tasks and is perceived as a natural behavior.