Context Is Cue-Cial: Assessing the Interpretation of Social Signals from Non-anthropomorphic Robots in Different Contexts
Chowdhury, Aparajita and Carrasco, Ana and Müller, Florian and Ahtinen, Aino and Väänänen, Kaisa and Schmidt, Albrecht and Leusmann, Jan
Abstract: Humans excel at understanding social cues in communication, but robots struggle. Social cues are crucial for humans to interpret the intentions of their communication partners. Research indicates that we typically interpret the actions of anthropomorphic robots analogously to their human counterparts, paving a clear path to the design of appropriate social cues. For non-anthropomorphic robots, however, it is an open question how humans interpret social cues with different output modalities and in different contexts. Our study investigates whether social cues signaled by typical non-anthropomorphic modalities such as lights, sounds, and gestures are consistently interpreted across people and contexts. We, therefore, conducted a contextual investigation in a hospital, derived scenarios from co-design workshop, and tested 103 cues collected from the literature in a large online survey (N = 1545). Our results demonstrate that most human interpretations vary by context, highlighting the need to design dynamic and adaptive social cues for interactive robotic systems.
@inproceedings{chowdhuryContextCueCialAssessing2026,title={Context {{Is Cue-Cial}}: {{Assessing}} the~{{Interpretation}} of~{{Social Signals}} from~{{Non-anthropomorphic Robots}} in~{{Different Contexts}}},shorttitle={Context {{Is Cue-Cial}}},booktitle={Social {{Robotics}} + {{AI}}},author={Chowdhury, Aparajita and Carrasco, Ana and M{\"u}ller, Florian and Ahtinen, Aino and V{\"a}{\"a}n{\"a}nen, Kaisa and Schmidt, Albrecht and Leusmann, Jan},editor={Staffa, Mariacarla and Cabibihan, John-John and Siciliano, Bruno and Ge, Shuzhi Sam and Bodenhagen, Leon and Tapus, Adriana and Rossi, Silvia and Cavallo, Filippo and Fiorini, Laura and Matarese, Marco and He, Hongsheng},year={2026},pages={311--330},publisher={Springer Nature},address={Singapore},doi={10.1007/978-981-95-2379-5_21},isbn={9789819523795},langid={english},keywords={human computer interaction,human-robot interaction,social signals,user-adaptive interaction},}
