Investigating the effect of social cues on social agency judgement

To advance the research area of social robotics, it is important to understand the effect of different social cues on the perceived social agency to a robot. This paper evaluates three sets of verbal and nonverbal social cues (emotional intonation voice, facial expression and head movement) demonstrated by a social agent delivering several messages. A convenience sample of 18 participants interacted with SociBot, a robot that can demonstrate such cues, experienced in sequence seven sets of combinations of social cues. After each interaction, participants rated the robot's social agency (assessing its resemblance to a real person, and the extent to which they judged it to be like a living creature). As expected, adding social cues led to higher social agency judgments; especially facial expression was connected to higher social agency judgments.