Gaze cueing is a fundamental part of social interactions, and broadly studied using Posner task based gaze cueing paradigms. While studies using human stimuli consistently yield a gaze cueing effect, results from studies using robotic stimuli are inconsistent. Typically, these studies use virtual agents or pictures of robots. As previous research has pointed to the significance of physical presence in human-robot interaction, it is of fundamental importance to understand its yet unexplored role in interactions with gaze cues. This paper investigates whether the physical presence of the iCub humanoid robot affects the strength of the gaze cueing effect in human-robot interaction. We exposed 42 participants to a gaze cueing task. We asked participants to react as quickly and accurately as possible to the appearance of a target stimulus that was either congruently or incongruently cued by the gaze of a copresent iCub robot or a virtual version of the same robot. Analysis of the reaction time measurements showed that participants were consistently affected by their robot interaction partner's gaze, independently on the way the robot was presented. Additional analyses of participants' ratings of the robot's anthropomorphism, animacy and likeability further add to the impression that presence does not play a significant role in simple gaze based interactions. Together our findings open up interesting discussions about the possibility to generalize results from studies using virtual agents to real life interactions with copresent robots.

翻译：注视引导是社会互动的基本组成部分，通常通过基于Posner任务的注视引导范式进行广泛研究。虽然使用人类刺激物的研究一致显示出注视引导效应，但使用机器人刺激物的研究结果并不一致。这些研究通常采用虚拟代理或机器人图片。鉴于先前研究已指出物理在场性在人机交互中的重要性，理解其在注视线索互动中尚未被探索的作用具有根本意义。本文探究iCub人形机器人的物理在场性是否影响人机交互中注视引导效应的强度。我们让42名参与者完成一项注视引导任务，要求他们对目标刺激的出现尽可能快速准确地做出反应，这些刺激由共处一室的iCub机器人或同一机器人的虚拟版本以一致或不一致的注视方式进行引导。反应时测量分析显示，参与者始终受到机器人互动伙伴注视的影响，且该效应与机器人呈现方式无关。对参与者关于机器人拟人度、生动度和喜好度评分的进一步分析也印证了：在场性在基于注视的简单互动中并未发挥显著作用。这些发现共同引发了关于是否可将基于虚拟代理的研究成果推广至与共处机器人真实互动的有趣讨论。