Brain Monitoring to Detect Nationality Difference Induced by Robot Gesture

Abstract

This paper reports an experimental study to confirm whether robot's gesture can induce country-by-country different response in human observers according to their nationalities. Robot greeting actions in Japanese, Chinese, and French styles were mimicked using the communication robot ApriPoco. Brain activity in the cortex area associated with a mirror neuron was investigated by the near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) to evaluate the country-by-country difference objectively. As a result, it was confirmed that nationality difference between Japanese and Chinese participants appeared in means of the sum of cerebral blood flow change (SBC) in a primary motor cortex (M1) and Brodmann area 44 (BA44). Moreover, it was shown that robot gesture enhanced the observer's SBC in case of Japanese participants who watches the mother language-style greeting and Chinese participants' SBC were emphasized by greeting gesture in abovementioned three types of language styles. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.