Hannah Pelikan, a PhD Student at Linköping University, Sweden, will give a guest talk to the lab.
Are you sad Cozmo? Participants' orientation to robot emotional displays
Recent work in human-robot interaction (HRI) has challenged the notion that robot emotional displays are unambiguous and independent of the specific interactional context (Fischer, Jung, Jensen & aus der Wieschen, 2019; Jung, 2017). While stressing that such emotional displays become relevant in a concrete sequential context, HRI research still continues to study how people rate robot emotions after a terminated interaction. In this talk, I will demonstrate how participants interpret robot emotional displays in the local sequential context of everyday interaction. Taking a conversation analytic perspective, I am drawing on video data of families interacting with a Cozmo toy robot in their homes. While participants often treat animations designed to express happiness or sadness as intended by the designer, they may also move beyond this binary distinction when making sense of robotic behavior in situated interaction. This shows us that a particular animation’s meaning potential (Linell, 2009) is actually broader. In addition, while animations that are designed as happy typically move the interaction forward, animations designed as sad are often oriented to as requiring repair. Such regularities open up interesting possibilities for using emotional displays as an interactional resource in human-robot interaction design.
About Hannah
2012-2015: BSc Cognitive Science at University of Osnabrueck, Germany and Linköping University, Sweden
> CA approach to human-robot interaction, CHI paper Why that Nao
2015: Internship & later student assistant job with Prof. Karola Pitsch, working on integration of Kinect data into CA analysis
2016-2018: MSc Interaction Technology at University of Twente, Netherlands; spent 6 months in Robots in Groups lab at Cornell University in Ithaca, USA
> study of teamwork in the surgical operating room, ethnography & CA; CSCW paper Operating at a Distance
since Nov 2018: PhD student in Linköping, working on non-lexical robot sounds in human-robot interaction