From cartoons to robots: Facial regions as cues to recognize emotions

This paper introduces a preliminary result of a cross-cultural study on the facial regions as cues to recognize virtual agents´ facial expressions. We believe providing research results on the perception of cartoonish virtual agents´ facial expressions to HRI research community is meaningful in order to minimize the effort to develop robot´s facial expressions. The result implies 1) the mouth region is more effective in conveying the emotions of the facial expressions than the eye region, 2) there are cultural differences in using facial regions as cues to recognize cartoonish facial expressions between Hungary and Japan.