Trust and Cognitive Load During Human-Robot Interaction

TL;DR

This study explores how cognitive load, robot anthropomorphism, and error rates influence human trust during collaborative game-based human-robot interactions, revealing complex relationships and perceptions.

Contribution

It provides new insights into how physical robot appearance and error rates affect trust and cognitive load in human-robot collaboration.

Findings

Trust decreases as cognitive load increases.

Participants trusted Pepper more under high error-rate conditions.

Husky was perceived as more trustworthy at low error-rates.

Abstract

This paper presents an exploratory study to understand the relationship between a humans' cognitive load, trust, and anthropomorphism during human-robot interaction. To understand the relationship, we created a \say{Matching the Pair} game that participants could play collaboratively with one of two robot types, Husky or Pepper. The goal was to understand if humans would trust the robot as a teammate while being in the game-playing situation that demanded a high level of cognitive load. Using a humanoid vs. a technical robot, we also investigated the impact of physical anthropomorphism and we furthermore tested the impact of robot error rate on subsequent judgments and behavior. Our results showed that there was an inversely proportional relationship between trust and cognitive load, suggesting that as the amount of cognitive load increased in the participants, their ratings of trust decreased. We also found a triple interaction impact between robot-type, error-rate and participant's ratings of trust. We found that participants perceived Pepper to be more trustworthy in comparison with the Husky robot after playing the game with both robots under high error-rate condition. On the contrary, Husky was perceived as more trustworthy than Pepper when it was depicted as featuring a low error-rate. Our results are interesting and call further investigation of the impact of physical anthropomorphism in combination with variable error-rates of the robot.