Physiological Affect and Performance in a Collaborative Serious Game Between Humans and an Autonomous Robot

This paper sets out to examine how elicited physiological affect influences the performance of human participants collaborating with the robot partners on a shared serious game task; furthermore, to investigate physiological affect underlying such human-robot proximate collaboration. The participants collaboratively played a turn-taking version of a serious game Tower of Hanoi, where physiological affect was investigated in a valence-arousal space. The arousal was inferred from the galvanic skin response data, while the valence was inferred from the electrocardiography data. It was found that the robot collaborators elicited a higher physiological affect in regard to both arousal and valence, in contrast to their human collaborator counterparts. Furthermore, a comparable performance between all collaborators was found on the serious game task.