Utilizing Mood-Inducing Background Music in Human-Robot Interaction

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that incorporating knowledge of background music can enhance a robot's ability to predict human behavior during interaction, specifically in driving scenarios involving mood-influencing music.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that mood-inducing background music can be integrated into robot decision-making models to improve human behavior prediction.

Findings

Music influences human driving behavior in simulated tasks.

Inclusion of music data improves robot's predictive accuracy.

Background music affects learned policy outcomes.

Abstract

Past research has clearly established that music can affect mood and that mood affects emotional and cognitive processing, and thus decision-making. It follows that if a robot interacting with a person needs to predict the person's behavior, knowledge of the music the person is listening to when acting is a potentially relevant feature. To date, however, there has not been any concrete evidence that a robot can improve its human-interactive decision-making by taking into account what the person is listening to. This research fills this gap by reporting the results of an experiment in which human participants were required to complete a task in the presence of an autonomous agent while listening to background music. Specifically, the participants drove a simulated car through an intersection while listening to music. The intersection was not empty, as another simulated vehicle, controlled autonomously, was also crossing the intersection in a different direction. Our results clearly indicate that such background information can be effectively incorporated in an agent's world representation in order to better predict people's behavior. We subsequently analyze how knowledge of music impacted both participant behavior and the resulting learned policy.\setcounter{footnote}{2}\footnote{An earlier version of part of the material in this paper appeared originally in the first author's Ph.D. Dissertation~\cite{liebman2020sequential} but it has not appeared in any pear-reviewed conference or journal.}