Modeling the Human Blink: a Computational Model for Use within Human-Robot Interaction

This paper describes findings from a Human-to-Human Interaction experiment that examines human communicative non-verbal facial behaviour. The aim was to develop a more comfortable and effective model of social human-robot communication. Analysis of the data revealed a strong cooccurrence between human blink production and non-verbal communicative behaviours of own speech instigation and completion, interlocutor speech instigation, looking at/away from the interlocutor, facial expression instigation and completion, and mental communicative state changes. Seventy-one percent of the total 2007 analysed blinks co-occurred with these behaviours within a time window of +/375ms, well beyond their chance co-occurrence probability of 23%. Thus between 48% and 71% of blinks are directly related to human communicative behaviour and are not simply "physiological" (e.g. for cleaning/humidifying the eye) . Female participants are found to blink twice as often as male participants, in the same communicative scenario, and have a longer average blink duration. These results provide the basis for the implementation of a blink generation system as part of a social cognitive robot for human-robot interaction.