Reflex or reflection? Oculomotor behavior of the companion robot, creating the impression of communicating with an emotional being

The control system of the companion robot F-2 implements a competitive system of productions (scenarios) to model the robot’s reaction in response to a wide range of events. The system is designed to provide balanced robot’s responses to speech utterances and other events recognized by the computer vision system (orientation of the user’s face and gaze, events in the Tangram game), as well as to the user’s touches. In the represented experiment, we apply this system to evaluate two robots that respond differently to the orientation of a person’s face and the direction of the gaze. According to the results, the balance of the robot’s oculomotor activity between fixation on human eyes and other current tasks is a key element ensuring a sense of social contact with an artificial agent. For the first time, it was found that the intensity of such an impression in the case of a robot implementing eye-to-eye contacts is determined by the level of the user's emotional intelligence. Implicit human reactions to the robot's gaze are also examined. In conclusion, we consider the problem of differences between reflexive and reflex behavior in eye movements in comparison with other communicative cues. We consider the question: what can be the minimum requirements to the architecture of a cognitive model capable of inducing the impression of the believability of robot behavior? In our opinion, this architecture should provide a balance between the social contacts and processing of target stimuli, responding with various communicative reactions, including reactions that are not the priority in this context. These behavioral cues of the “second priority” may give a person the impression of communicating with an emotional being.