Influence of user’s personality on task execution when reminded by a robot

One of the main purposes of companion robots is to use them to remind their users about the tasks they have to do. The interaction requires robots to adapt to the person with respect to their preferences. The performance of the human when a robot reminds them to do a certain task is of great importance. Findings in social psychology show that personality influences the way that humans interact. In this work, we conducted an experiment of task reminders in an office-like environment with a robot reminding tasks to a person while the person is doing other office-activities, with the goal of searching for positive influences of the robot on user’s personality. Nine different conditions were studied with the robot varying its behavior and appearance. Results show that the user’s personality has an influence on his/her time to perform a task while being reminded by a robot to perform such task, showing that people with high conscientiousness are more promoted by the robot to finish the task earlier than people with low conscientiousness, and also that introverted people are more motivated by the robot to finish the task earlier than extroverted people.