Influence of Environmental Context on Recognition Rates of Stylized Walking Sequences

Affective movement will likely be an important component of robotic interaction as more and more robots move into human-facing scenarios where humans are (consciously or unconsciously) constantly monitoring the motion profile of counterparts in order to make judgments about the state of their counterpart. Many current studies in affective movement recognition and generation seek to either increase a machine’s ability to correctly identify human affect or to identify and create components of robotic movement that enhance human perception. However, very few of these studies investigate the influence of environmental context on a machine’s ability to correctly identity human affect or a human’s ability to correctly identify the affective intent of a robot. This paper presents the results of a user study that investigated how human perception of stylized walking sequences (created in [1]) varied based on the environment where they were portrayed. The results show that environment context can impact a person’s ability to correctly perceive the intended style of a movement.