An examination of gaze during conversation for designing culture-based robot behavior

Abstract

Gaze behavior, including eye contact and gaze direction, is an essential component of non-verbal communication, helping to facilitate human-to-human conversation in ways that have often been thought of as universal and innate. However, these have been shown to be influenced partially by cultural norms and background, and despite this, the majority of social robots do not have any cultural-based non-verbal behaviors and several lack any directional gaze capabilities at all. This study aims to observe how different gaze behaviors manifest during conversation as a function of culture as well as exposure to other cultures, by examining differences in behaviors such as duration of direct gaze, duration and direction of averted gaze, and average number of shifts in gaze, with the objective of establishing a baseline of Japanese gaze behavior to be implemented into a social robot. Japanese subjects were found to have much more averted gaze during a task that involves thinking as opposed to a task focused on communication. Subjects with significant experience living overseas were found to have different directional gaze patterns from subjects with little to no overseas experience, implying that non-verbal behavior patterns can change with exposure to other cultures.