Effects of multimodal cues on children's perception of uncanniness in a social robot
This paper investigates the influence of multimodal incongruent gender cues on the perception of a robot's uncanniness and gender in children. The back projected robot head Furhat was equipped with a female and male face texture and voice synthesizer and the voice and facial cues were tested in congruent and incongruent combinations. 106 children between the age of 8 and 13 participated in the study. Results show that multimodal incongruent cues do not trigger the feeling of uncanniness in children. These results are significant as they support other recent research showing that the perception of uncanniness cannot be triggered by a categorical ambiguity in the robot. In addition, we found that children rely on auditory cues much stronger than on the facial cues when assigning a gender to the robot if presented with incongruent cues. These findings have implications for the robot design, as it seems possible to change the gender of a robot by only changing its voice without creating a feeling of uncanniness in a child.
ICMI