Exploring effects of educational backgrounds and gender in human-robot interaction

Recent Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research has focused on human factors. To deepen the exploration of human factors in HRI, research has also investigated humans´ educational backgrounds and gender, and the gender assignment of robots. In a psychological experiment, robot gender was assigned only by the name of the robot and a brief verbal instruction by the experimenters. The results showed that subjects with educational backgrounds of natural science and technology had stronger impressions toward the robot than did those of a social science background. Additionally, the perceived robot femininity and one of the impressions positively influenced the recall task scores of the robot´s utterances, in particular in male samples.