Turn-taking Supports Humanlikeness and Communication in Perceptual Crossing Experiments -Toward developing human-like communicable interface devices- Hiroyuki Iizuka, Davide Marocco, Hideyuki Ando and Taro Maeda Graduate School of Information Science & Technology Osaka University 2-1 Yamadaoka, Suita, Osaka, 565-0871, Japan {iizuka, hide, t_maeda}@ist.osaka-u.ac.jp Centre of Robotics and Neural Systems, University of Plymouth Drake Circus, Plymouth PL4 8AA, United Kingdom davide.marocco@plymouth.ac.uk Abstract—Our aim of this paper is to investigate the human communication in terms of two following questions. One is how human can know the fact that an interacting partner is human. Another is how non-communicative behaviour can become communicative. To answer these questions, we performed two experiments exploiting the idea of perceptual crossing experiments. As a result, we will show that the turn-taking structure supports humanlikeness and human communication in the primitive non-verbal interaction. Our results will be discussed with ambient interface technology. Keywords-Ambient information society, behavioural turing test; emergence of communication; perceptual crossing experiment; I. INTRODUCTION The concept of ubiquitous information society is to establish sensory-spaces where a number of and various kinds of sensors are distributed, to collect all information of the space and to display collected useful information to everybody. All users are always connected information society and “anywhere, anytime, anyone” can access to information in a flexible manner. The concept of ubiquitous has a lot of potential in our future society. However, human capability to understand such information is limited and the amount of information can easily go beyond user’s handling ability. Recognizing these situations, a slightly different concept has been proposed, which is ambient information society [1]. It is a similar concept but differs in a following important point. As well as the ubiquitous information society, the sensor-spaces are required but those collected information is given to users personally and intuitively. It means that the ambient information society provides desired information to a user according to their circumstances. Therefore, the concept can be “information is given to users according to current time, place, and personal preferences”. The difference of required technologies between ambient and ubiquitous information societies is that the former needs information of the behavioural context to provide user’s desired information at a proper timing for a user. Therefore, the integrated system for the ambient information society needs to actively interact with users somehow to read their intention or states rather than passively collecting information. However, how the system can harmonically support or interact with humans or how the devices can communicate with human user is an open question. The supports by the devices should be naturally and intuitively superimposed over the user’s intention and behaviors and should avoid interrupting user activities. Human can achieve this smooth interaction by communicating with the other and can read the context of the interactions. Yet, unfortunately, there is no design principle for interface devices to realize the smooth interactions like human communication. Understanding the basic principles of human communication is essential but the reason why it has been difficult to establish a design theory of human communication so far is that we mainly have pragmatics only. On the other hand a new line of research, which has recently been labelled as experimental semiotics by Galantucci [2], goes beyond spoken language and centres on communication in a broader sense. The study’s objectives focus on the emergence of new forms of communication in different modalities rather than the use of pre-existing forms. By investigating the emergence of the communication in different modalities, the approach clarifies the basic principles of communication without being swayed by our prejudice to human communication. Similar to the experimental semiotics, Auvray et al. have investigated the social dynamic interaction in a minimal shared virtual environment, which is called perceptual crossing experiment [3]. There are also some theoretical studies with the perceptual crossing experiment to understand social interactions in terms of dynamical systems. The advantage of the perceptual crossing experiments is that it is so simply designed that it becomes much easier to analyze the behaviours to clarify the basic principles of social interaction. In this paper, we exploited this paradigm to investigate the human communication to tackle two questions. One is how human can know the fact that an interacting partner is human in the non-verbal interaction. Another is how non- communicative behaviour can become communicative. We will show two experiments. The first experiment investigates the difference between human and non-human behaviour and how human discriminates human with the other. As a result, we will show the emergence of turn-taking structure between humans in the behavioural turing test, which could be regarded as the primitive behavioural communication. The 978-1-4673-1246-2/12/$31.00 ©2012 IEEE