News Report: Touching robots can arouse humans, study finds

[slvsara]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... tudy-finds

Admittedly, a rather small sample size. And I have yet to locate any links to the paper/presentation in question. Even so, I think this might be of some interest to those assembled here.

The primary, salient points regarding the study, as stated in the article:

"... The ten human volunteers — four female, six male - in the experiment simply responded to commands from the voice of an Aldebaran Robotics Nao robot that had been programmed to tell participants to touch any of 13 parts of its body, using their dominant hand. On the non-dominant hand, the volunteers wore a sensor that measured skin conductance, which is itself an indicator of physiological, and perhaps emotional, arousal.

In 26 trials, the scientists found that a touch upon what they politely call the “less accessible” regions of the robot was more arousing than touching the creature’s hands or feet. No such response was measured when volunteers were asked only to point.

“Social robots can elicit tactile responses in human physiology, a result that signals the power of robots, and should caution mechanical and interaction designers about positive and negative effects of human-robot interactions,” the researchers conclude.

The covering of the toy-like automaton was plastic, with no textural or temperature differences anywhere. If it was skin contact that produced arousal it would happen wherever the volunteer made contact. In fact the response was higher for “body parts with low accessibility.” ..."

[jolshefsky]

In 26 trials, the scientists found that a touch upon what they politely call the “less accessible” regions of the robot was more arousing than touching the creature’s hands or feet. No such response was measured when volunteers were asked only to point.

They should take a shot at going inside the "creature"–see how aroused those volunteers get when they touch an even "'less accessible' region".

[JessicaDupre]

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