Unintended Consonances: Methods to Understand Robot Motor Sound Perception

Summary

Recent research suggests that a robot's motors make sounds that can influence users' perception of the robot's characteristics. To more deeply understand users' associations with specific sonic characteristics, we adapted methods from sensory science including Check All That Apply (CATA) questions and Polarized Sensory Positioning (PSP) to tease out small differences in motor sounds in an online survey. These methods are straightforward for untrained people to do in an online setting, mathematically rigorous, and can explore a variety of subtle auditory and perceptual stimuli. We describe how to use these methods, interpret the results with several intuitive visual representations, and show that the results align with a previous study of the same dataset. We close by discussing benefits and limitations of applying these methods to study subtle phenomena in the HCI community.