"Who Should I Believe?": User Interpretation and Decision-Making When a Family Healthcare Robot Contradicts Human Memory

Advancements in robotic capabilities for providing physical assistance, psychological support, and daily health management are making the deployment of intelligent healthcare robots in home environments increasingly feasible in the near future. However, challenges arise when the information provided by these robots contradicts users' memory, raising concerns about user trust and decision-making. This paper presents a study that examines how varying a robot's level of transparency and sociability influences user interpretation, decision-making and perceived trust when faced with conflicting information from a robot. In a 2 x 2 between-subjects online study, 176 participants watched videos of a Furhat robot acting as a family healthcare assistant and suggesting a fictional user to take medication at a different time from that remembered by the user. Results indicate that robot transparency influenced users' interpretation of information discrepancies: with a low transparency robot, the most frequent assumption was that the user had not correctly remembered the time, while with the high transparency robot, participants were more likely to attribute the discrepancy to external factors, such as a partner or another household member modifying the robot's information. Additionally, participants exhibited a tendency toward overtrust, often prioritizing the robot's recommendations over the user's memory, even when suspecting system malfunctions or third-party interference. These findings highlight the impact of transparency mechanisms in robotic systems, the complexity and importance associated with system access control for multi-user robots deployed in home environments, and the potential risks of users' over reliance on robots in sensitive domains such as healthcare.

UpStory: the Uppsala Storytelling dataset

Friendship and rapport play an important role in the formation of constructive social interactions, and have been widely studied in educational settings due to their impact on student outcomes. Given the growing interest in automating the analysis of such phenomena through Machine Learning (ML), access to annotated interaction datasets is highly valuable. However, no dataset on dyadic child-child interactions explicitly capturing rapport currently exists. Moreover, despite advances in the automatic analysis of human behaviour, no previous work has addressed the prediction of rapport in child-child dyadic interactions in educational settings. We present UpStory -- the Uppsala Storytelling dataset: a novel dataset of naturalistic dyadic interactions between primary school aged children, with an experimental manipulation of rapport. Pairs of children aged 8-10 participate in a task-oriented activity: designing a story together, while being allowed free movement within the play area. We promote balanced collection of different levels of rapport by using a within-subjects design: self-reported friendships are used to pair each child twice, either minimizing or maximizing pair separation in the friendship network. The dataset contains data for 35 pairs, totalling 3h 40m of audio and video recordings. It includes two video sources covering the play area, as well as separate voice recordings for each child. An anonymized version of the dataset is made publicly available, containing per-frame head pose, body pose, and face features; as well as per-pair information, including the level of rapport. Finally, we provide ML baselines for the prediction of rapport.