Invited Talks

Prof. Verena V. Hafner

Robot attentional models for intuitive HRI

The ability to share the attention with another individual is essential for having intuitive interaction. Two relatively simple, but important prerequisites for this, saliency detection and attention manipulation by the robot, are identified. By creating a saliency based attentional model combined with a robot ego-sphere and by adopting attention manipulation skills, the robot can engage in an interaction with a human and start an interaction game including objects as a first step towards a joint attention. The robot’s level of interactiveness has been found to be positively correlated with user experience factors like excitement and robot factors like lifelikeness and intelligence, suggesting that robots must give as much feedback as possible in order to increase the intuitiveness of the interaction, even when performing only attentive behaviours.

Schillaci, G., Bodiroza, S. and Hafner, V.V. (2013), Evaluating the Effect of Saliency Detection and Attention Manipulation in Human-Robot Interaction, International Journal of Social Robotics, Springer, Volume 5, Issue 1 (2013), pages 139-152, DOI 10.1007/s12369-012-0174-7 OPEN ACCESS.

Prof. Daniel T. Levin

Seeing, thinking, and understanding: The role of visual attention during HRI

Research over the past 15 years has documented a range of surprising attention-induced limits to visual awareness. Not only is it important to understand how these limits may affect HRI in themselves, but people's relatively poor understanding of their attentional blind spots may be equally important in preventing suboptimal allocation of attention during HRI. In this talk I review research documenting phenomena such as change blindness, inattention blindness and repetition blindness and then describe how these limits seem to require that we consider temporal dynamics of visual attention more carefully. In addition, I will describe a set of metacognitive blind spots which we refer to as "illusions of visual bandwidth" that can affect use of technology in a wide variety of settings.