Role of embodiment and presence in human perception of robots' facial cues.

•A quantitative approach to distinguish the role of embodiment from physical presence of a social robot.•Studied three elements of facial cues (eye gaze, facial expression, and visual speech) in understanding the role of embodiment and physical presence with three different agents (robot, Tele-present robot, and virtual agent) with a human agent as a baseline.•Major findings of the study are: Neither embodiment nor presence plays a role at improving the perception of visual speech, regardless of syntactic or semantic cues in sentences. Both embodiment and physical presence improve the perception of certain facial expressions in emotive agents. The combination of embodiment and presence (and mainly embodiment) highly affects the precision of eye gaze perception in a frontal situated setting.