Niki and Julie: a robot and virtual human for studying multimodal social interaction

Abstract

We demonstrate two agents, a robot and a virtual human, which can be used for studying factors that impact social influence. The agents engage in dialogue scenarios that build familiarity, share information, and attempt to influence a human participant. The scenarios are variants of the classical “survival task,” where members of a team rank the importance of a number of items (e.g., items that might help one survive a crash in the desert). These are ranked individually and then re-ranked following a team discussion, and the difference in ranking provides an objective measure of social influence. Survival tasks have been used in psychology, virtual human research, and human-robot interaction. Our agents are operated in a “Wizard-of-Oz” fashion, where a hidden human operator chooses the agents’ dialogue actions while interacting with an experiment participant.