2023/03/06 by Haoyang Jiang, Jiang, Haoyang, Elizabeth A. Croft +3 · 1 citation
Neuroscience · Physics and Astronomy · #Cognitive Science and Education Research #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #Robotics (cs.RO)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2303.02904
openalex publication_date 2023/03/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Robots that work close to humans need to understand and use social cues to act in a socially acceptable manner. Social cues are a form of communication (i.e., information flow) between people. In this paper, a framework is introduced to detect and analyse a class of perceptible social cues that are nonverbal and episodic, and the related information transfer using an information-theoretic measure, namely, transfer entropy. We use a group-joining setting to demonstrate the practicality of transfer entropy for analysing communications between humans. Then we demonstrate the framework in two settings involving social interactions between humans: object-handover and person-following. Our results show that transfer entropy can identify information flows between agents and when and where they occur. Potential applications of the framework include information flow or social cue analysis for interactive robot design and socially-aware robot planning.