Demanding attention

Depending on the situation, light, sound, speech, movements or attention- grabbing gestures (like waving) can be used to draw the user’s attention to the robot. Research indicates that auditory cues, particularly verbal output, generate faster reactions compared to visual cues which are only perceivable in the visual periphery. Animated movement attract more attentions than simple ones. Combining several modalities can increase the user’s attention in comparison to using single visual cues. In this connection, it should be noted that most robots emit sound through their motors when expressing movements and gestures, which makes these expressions multimodal per se. Eye contact (a social cue that is often used in human-human interaction to establish mutual attention) has found to be too subtle when the robot is trying to attract initial attention, but can be a means of maintaining attention, when the user is already looking at the robot. References and further reading: J. Lee, Aoki, Stefanov, Yamamoto, & Obinata, 2016; Torta, van Heumen, Piunti, Romeo, & Cuijpers, 2015