Beware of the Tablet: A Dominant Distractor in Human-Robot Interaction
Linlin Cheng, Artem V. Belopolsky, Mark de Bruijn, Koen V. Hindriks
Abstract
The present study aims at investigating how humans engage with common communication modalities—speech, tablet, and gesture—when interacting with a humanoid robot. To explore this, we designed a live interaction experiment using a congruence paradigm, where participants engaged with a robot presenting two out of three modalities simultaneously: one as the primary cue and the other as a distracting cue. We measured participants’ task performance (response time, error rate) and fixation distribution (fixation count and duration proportions) across different roles (primary, distracting, neither) and areas of interest (face, tablet, gesture). Additionally, we compared fixation patterns between the performance and baseline phases. Our findings reveal that while the tablet is the most effective modality for task engagement, it also serves as a strong attentional distractor, dominating gaze allocation regardless of its informational value. This underscores the importance of carefully balancing tablet integration in HRI design. Notably, our results demonstrate that gaze patterns alone do not fully reveal attentional focus, emphasizing the need to consider both overt and covert cognitive processes in multimodal HRI. These insights provide valuable guidelines for designing more effective and engaging human-robot interactions.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{iros2025_bewareofthetable,
title = {Beware of the Tablet: A Dominant Distractor in Human-Robot Interaction},
author = {Linlin Cheng and Artem V. Belopolsky and Mark de Bruijn and Koen V. Hindriks},
booktitle = {IROS 2025},
year = {2025}
}