Does the appearance of a robot affect users' ways of giving Commands and feedback?

Our study compares users' interaction with a humanoid robot and a dog-shaped pet-robot. We conducted a user study in which the participants had to teach object names as well as simple commands to either the humanoid or the pet-robot and give feedback to the robot for correct and incorrect performance. While we found, that the way of uttering commands rather depends on personal preference than on the robots' appearance, the way of giving positive and negative feedback differed significantly between both robots: We found that for the pet-robot users gave reward in a similar way as giving reward to a real dog by touching it and commenting on its performance by uttering feedback like “well done” or “that was right”. For the humanoid, users typically did not use touch as a reward and rather used personal expressions like “thank you” to praise the robot. Our findings suggest that users actually rely to some degree on the appearance of a robot as a cue for deciding how to interact with it.