Abstract
The ability to draw other agents’ attention to objects and events is an important skill on the critical path to effective human-robot collaboration. People use the act of pointing to draw other people’s attention to objects and events for a wide range of purposes. While there is significant work that aims to understand people’s pointing behavior, there is little work analyzing how people interpret robot pointing. Since robots have a wide range of physical bodies and cognitive architectures, interpreting pointing will be determined by a specific robot’s morphology and behavior. Humanoids and robots whose heads, torso and arms resemble humans that point may be easier for people to interpret, however if such robots have different perceptual capabilities to people then misinterpretation may occur. In this paper we investigate how ordinary people interpret the pointing behavior of a leading state-of-the-art service robot that has been designed to work closely with people. We tested three hypotheses about how robot pointing is interpreted. The most surprising finding was that the direction and pitch of the robot’s head was important in some conditions.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Anderson, R.: Cognitive psychology and its implications, 6th edn. Worth Publishers (2004)
Axelrod, R.: The Evolution of Cooperation. Basic Books, NY (1984)
Wright, R.D., Ward, L.M.: Orienting of Attention. Oxford University Press (2008)
Wolfe, J.M.: Guided search 2.0: a revised model of visual search. Psychonomic Bulletin Review 1(2), 202–238 (1994)
Brinck, I.: Attention and the evolution of intentional communication. Pragmatics & Cognition 9(2), 255–272 (2001)
Boyd, R., Richerson, P.J.: Culture and Evolutionary Process, Chicago (1985)
Castiello, U., Umilta, C.: Size of the attentional focus and efficiency of processing. Acta Psychologica 73(3), 195–209 (1990), doi:10.1016/0001-6918(90)90022-8; Corballis, M.C.: From Hand to Mouth. The Origins of Language, Princeton, NJ (2002)
Deutsch, J.A., Deutsch, D.: Attention: some theoretical considerations. Psychological Review 70, 80–90 (1963)
Donald, M.: Origins of the Modern Mind. Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition, Cambridge, MA (1991)
Cohen, P.R., Leveque, H.: Intention Is Choice with Commitment. Artificial Intelligence 42, 213–261 (1990)
Eriksen, C., St James, J.: Visual attention within and around the field of focal attention: A zoom lens model. Perception & Psychophysics 40(4), 225–240 (1986); Eriksen, C.W., Hoffman, J.E.: The extent of processing of noise elements during selective encoding from visual displays. Perception & Psychophysics 14(1), 155–160 (1973)
Givon, T., Malle, B. (eds.): The Evolution of Language out of Pre-Language, Philadelphia (2002)
Hauser, M.: The Evolution of Communication, Cambridge (1996)
Jonides, J.: Further towards a model of the mind’s eye’s movement. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 21(4), 247–250 (1983)
Kopp, L., Gärdenfors, P.: Attention as a minimal criterion of intentionality in robots. Cognitive Science Quarterly 2, 302–319
Lavie, N., Hirst, A., de Fockert, J.W., Viding, E.: Load theory of selective attention and cognitive control. J. of Experimental Psychology 133(3), 339–354 (2004)
McNeill, D.: Hand and Mind. What Gestures Reveal About Thought, Chicago (1992)
McNeill, D.: Gesture & Thought. U. of Chicago Press (2005)
Novianto, R., Johnston, B., Williams, M.-A.: Attention in the ASMO Cognitive Architecture. In: International Conference on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures (2010)
Rizzolatti, G., Arbib, M.A.: Language within Our Grasp. Trends in Neuroscience 21, 188–194 (1998)
Schilbach, L., Wilms, M., Eickhoff, S.B., Romanzetti, S., Tepest, R., Bente, G., Shah, N.J., Fink, G.R., Vogeley, K.: Minds made for sharing: initiating joint attention recruits reward-related neurocircuitry. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 22(12), 2702–2715 (2010)
Tomasello, M.: Why don’t apes point? In: Enfield, N.J., Levinson, S.C. (eds.) Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Interaction, Berg, pp. 506–524 (2006)
Tomasello, M.: Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge University Press (2009)
Treisman, A., Gelade, G.: A feature-integration theory of attention. Cognitive Psychology 12(1), 97–136 (1980)
Williams, M.-A.: Robot Social Intelligence. In: Ge, S.S., Khatib, O., Cabibihan, J.-J., Simmons, R., Williams, M.-A. (eds.) ICSR 2012. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 7621, pp. 45–55. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Wnuczko, M., Kennedy, J.M.: Pivots for pointing: Visually-monitored pointing has higher arm elevations than pointing blindfolded. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 37, 1485–1491 (2011)
Camaioni, L., Perucchini, P., Bellagamba, F., Colonnesi, C.: The Role of Declarative Pointing in Developing a Theory of Mind. Infancy 5(3), 291–308 (2004), doi:10.1207/s15327078in0503_3
Carpenter, M., Nagell, K., Tomasello, M.: Social cognition, joint attention, and communicative competence from 9 to 15 months of age. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 63(4, Serial No. 255) (1998)
Sodian, B., Thoermer, C.: Infants’ under-standing of looking, pointing, and reaching as cues to goal-directed action. J. of Cognition and Development 5, 289–316 (2004)
Gärdenfors, P.: How Homo Became Sapiens. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2003)
Gärdenfors, P., Warglien, P.: The development of semantic space for pointing and verbal communication. To Appear in Conceptual Spaces and the Construal of Spatial Meaning: Empirical Evidence from Human Communication. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Williams, MA., Abidi, S., Gärdenfors, P., Wang, X., Kuipers, B., Johnston, B. (2013). Interpreting Robot Pointing Behavior. In: Herrmann, G., Pearson, M.J., Lenz, A., Bremner, P., Spiers, A., Leonards, U. (eds) Social Robotics. ICSR 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8239. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02675-6_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02675-6_15
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-02674-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-02675-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)