Priming and Timing in Human-Robot Interactions

The way a person moves can have an impact on how other individuals move. This is termed “movement priming, " and it can have important implications, i.e., for rehabilitation. Very little attention has so far been given to priming of human movement by robots: Does the movement of robots affect how people around them move? What are the implications of such priming, if it exists? Here, we briefly review the topic of human-human priming and then the evidence for robot-human priming. We dedicate a section to the timing of the robotic movement, as it both primes the movement of users (people move slower in the presence of a slow-moving robot, for example) and is also an important determinant in user satisfaction from the interaction with the robot. In fact, user satisfaction is affected not only by the timing of the robot’s movements, but also by the timing of the robot’s speech, and even by the timing of the errors it makes (e.g., at the beginning vs. at the end of the interaction with the user). We conclude with potential explanations for why robots prime the movements of humans, and why timing plays such an important role in human-robot interaction.