Kun Xu, University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications Telecommunication assistant professor in emerging media, is the author of “First Encounter with Robot Alpha: How Individual Differences Interact with Vocal and Kinetic Cues in Users’ Social Responses” published in the New Media & Society on May 31.

The article focuses on how different social cues, e.g. human voice versus synthetic voice and gestural movements versus non-gestural movements, of a humanoid social robot have different impacts on users’ trust and affinity.

According to Xu, the results suggested that while the human voice of the robot increased its perceived trustworthiness, gestural movements heightened users’ attachment to the robot and reinforced their future interaction motivations. The power of the human voice over the synthetic voice in evoking users’ trust supports the perspective that cues with more human features had stronger effects on users’ social responses.

He states that technological advances have made social robots very accessible. The study has revealed some social and design implications for human–machine communication and also pointed the way to more nuanced and comprehensive discoveries of users’ psychological processing of social robots in the future.

Posted: August 27, 2019
Category: College News
Tagged as: Kun Xu