Impression Conveyance with Responsive Robot Gaze in a Conversational Situtation

In face-to-face communication, eyes play a central role, for example, in directing attention and regulating turn-taking. For this reason, the eyes have been a central topic in several fields of interaction study. Although many psychological findings have encouraged previous work in both human-computer and human-robot interaction studies, so far there have been few explorations on how to move the agent's eye, including when to move it, for communication. Therefore, we investigate this topic in this study. The impression a person forms from an interaction is strongly influenced by the degree to which their partner's gaze direction correlates with their own. In this paper, we evaluate two primitive ways of controlling a robot's gaze responsively to its partner's gaze by comparison with two additional ways of non-responsive gaze control in an experiment set in a conversational situation. Consequently, we confirm that robots with different types of responsive gaze control can give subjects different impressions of its characteristics