Spatiotemporal Coordination Supports a Sense of Commitment in Human-Robot Interaction

In the current study, we presented participants with videos in which a humanoid robot (iCub) and a human agent were tidying up by moving toys from a table into a container. In the High Coordination condition, the two agents worked together in a coordinated manner, with the human picking up the toys and passing them to the robot. In the Low Coordination condition, they worked in parallel without coordinating. Participants were asked to imagine themselves in the position of the human agent and to respond to a battery of questions to probe the extent to which they felt committed to the joint action. While we did not observe a main effect of our coordination manipulation, the results do reveal that participants who perceived a higher degree of coordination also indicated a greater sense of commitment to the joint action. Moreover, the results show that participants’ sensitivity to the coordination manipulation was contingent on their prior attitudes towards the robot: participants in the High Coordination condition reported a greater sense of commitment than participants in the Low Coordination condition, except among those participants who were a priori least inclined to experience a close sense of relationship with the robot.