Exploring the Impact of Narrator Type on Response Latency and Utterance Length During Interactive Storytelling

The inexorable progress of technology brought forth an era where robots increasingly integrate into human life which necessitates the understanding of human-robot interactions (HRI). This study unravels the details of HRI within interactive storytelling contexts. Through a between-subject experiment with 28 participants, we assessed response latency and utterance lengths to interactive story narrations delivered by either a human or a robot. Findings indicated that participants displayed longer response latency interacting with the robot narrator while articulating shorter utterances compared to the human condition where participants displayed longer utterances and shorter response latency. These observations suggest significant differences in cognitive and communicative strategies in human-human versus human-robot interactions. The results underscore the challenges and potential of designing social robots that are time-sensitive in interacting with humans. Future explorations should focus on the cognitive and emotional drivers behind these interactions.