Investigating Human-Robot Overtrust During Crises

Our research focuses on human-robot interaction (HRI) during life-or-death emergencies. We have developed an immersive virtual reality (VR) testbed because conducting real-world crisis simulations would pose prohibitive logistical difficulties, as well as to leverage the affordances of VR technology to measure motor behavior (e.g., distance maintained between self and robot), information foraging (e.g., as indexed by headset movement variability and eyetracking), or autonomic arousal (e.g., as indexed by shifts in pupil dilation or grip strength). Findings to date using minimally haptic VR confirm that participants treat the simulated active-shooter crisis seriously, and act in ways which validly mirror prior studies of real-world HRI under threat. We will describe these methods, including our manipulation of robot anthropomorphism and our current move to integrate full-body haptics to maximize both experiential immersion and incentives to avoid pain.