“Am I Talking to a Human or a Robot?”: A Preliminary Study of Human’s Perception in Human-Humanoid Interaction and Its Effects in Cognitive and Emotional States

The current preliminary study concerns the identification of the effects human-humanoid interaction can have on human emotional states and behaviors, through a physical interaction. Thus, we have used three cases where people face three different types of physical interaction with a neutral person, Nadine social robot and the person on which Nadine was modelled, Professor Nadia Thalmann. To support our research, we have used EEG recordings to capture the physiological signals derived from the brain during each interaction, audio recordings to compare speech features and a questionnaire to provide psychometric data that can complement the above. Our results mainly showed the existence of frontal theta oscillations while interacting with the humanoid that probably shows the higher cognitive effort of the participants, as well as differences in the occipital area of the brain and thus, the visual attention mechanisms. The level of concentration and motivation of participants while interacting with the robot were higher indicating also higher amount of interest. The outcome of this experiment can broaden the field of human-robot interaction, leading to more efficient, meaningful and natural human-robot interaction.