The Effect of Emotions and Social Behavior on Performance in a Collaborative Serious Game Between Humans and Autonomous Robots

The aim of this paper is to investigate performance in a collaborative human–robot interaction on a shared serious game task. Furthermore, the effect of elicited emotions and perceived social behavior categories on players’ performance will be investigated. The participants collaboratively played a turn-taking version of the Tower of Hanoi serious game, together with the human and robot collaborators. The elicited emotions were analyzed in regards to the arousal and valence variables, computed from the Geneva Emotion Wheel questionnaire. Moreover, the perceived social behavior categories were obtained from analyzing and grouping replies to the Interactive Experiences and Trust and Respect questionnaires. It was found that the results did not show a statistically significant difference in participants’ performance between the human or robot collaborators. Moreover, all of the collaborators elicited similar emotions, where the human collaborator was perceived as more credible and socially present than the robot one. It is suggested that using robot collaborators might be as efficient as using human ones, in the context of serious game collaborative tasks.