Social RoboticsA furrowed 'thinking face' makes an android seem more human
Hiroshima University and RIKEN tested pause expressions on the android Nikola.
The team first filmed people answering questions to identify the facial movements that signal thinking, then had the RIKEN android Nikola display a furrowed expression during conversational pauses. Raters judged the furrowed face more genuine, human-like and appropriate, and less eerie, than neutral or smiling alternatives, although on-screen dots signalled processing more clearly. The work, published in the International Journal of Social Robotics, suggests that borrowing familiar human cues can soften the uncanny valley. As conversational robots increasingly pause while a language model generates a reply, how they fill that silence is becoming a practical design question.
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