Impact of nonverbal robot behaviour on human teachers’ perceptions of a learner robot

How do we perceive robots practising a task that we have taught them? While learning, human trainees usually provide nonverbal cues that reveal their level of understanding and interest in the task. Similarly, nonverbal social cues of trainee robots that can be interpreted naturally by humans can enhance robot learning. In this article, we investigated a scenario in which a robot is practising a physical task in front of the human teachers (i.e., participants), who were asked to assume that they had previously taught the robot to perform that task. Through an online experiment with 167 participants, we examined the effects of different gaze patterns and arm movements with multiple speeds and various kinds of pauses on human teachers’ perception of different attributes of the robot. We found that the perception of a trainee robot’s attributes (e.g., confidence and eagerness to learn) can be systematically affected by its behaviours. Findings of this study can inform designing more successful nonverbal social interactions for intelligent robots.