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This paper investigates how older and younger adults perceive deictic gaze (eye and head movements indicating direction) from a Pepper robot during a visual search task. The study found that while both age groups benefited from the robot's gaze cues in terms of task performance, older adults' social perception was less influenced by the robot's gaze behavior compared to younger adults. This suggests that age-related differences exist in how individuals interpret and respond to non-verbal cues from social robots.
Older adults benefit from a social robot's gaze cues for task performance, but their social perception is less influenced by these cues compared to younger adults, highlighting the need for age-adaptive robot communication strategies.
The sensibility to deictic gaze declines naturally with age and often results in reduced social perception. Thus, the increasing efforts in developing social robots that assist older adults during daily life tasks need to consider the effects of aging. In this context, as non-verbal cues such as deictic gaze are important in natural communication in human-robot interaction, this paper investigates the performance of older adults, as compared to younger adults, during a controlled, online (visual search) task inspired by daily life activities, while assisted by a social robot.This paper also examines age-related differences in social perception. Our results showed a significant facilitation effect of head movement representing deictic gaze from a Pepper robot on task performance. This facilitation effect was not significantly different between the age groups. However, social perception of the robot was less influenced by its deictic gaze behavior in older adults, as compared to younger adults. This line of research may ultimately help informing the design of adaptive non-verbal cues from social robots for a wide range of end users.
