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Auditory instruction is a well used method for people of all ages because of its understandability. However the additional voice has the possibility to disturb the user's learning during the instruction because it strongly implies the support of third-person helpers. This risk increases with older people because their confidence in their ability may decline compared to the younger people. The authors propose a method to anthropomorphize an instructed target (a vacuum) to decrease the feeling of a third person during instruction. The authors conducted the experiment using our method to explain features of household appliance and evaluated the relationship between recalled features and older people's internal scale. The results show that older people remembered more features by using our method, and with female participants, their internal scales increased during the training. This demonstrates that our method can decrease the third-person feeling in female participants and increase the amount learned. Our findings suggest that auditory instructions may be an effective learning method for older adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we propose a disembodied real-world agent and the study of the influence of this disembodiment on the social separation between the user and the agent. In order to give a clue to the user about the presence of the robot and to make possible a visual feedback, we decide to use independent robotic body parts that mimic human hands and eyes. This robot is also able to share real-world space with the user, and react to his presence, through 3d detection and oral communication. Thus, we can obtain an agent with an important presence while keeping good space efficiency, and as a result ban any existing social barrier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we compare user behavior towards the humanoid robot ASIMO and the dog-shaped robot AIBO in a simple task, in which the users has to teach commands and feedback to the robot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]