Designing Personalization Cues for Museum Robots: Docent Observation and Controlled Studies

Social robots in public cultural venues, such as science museums, must engage diverse visitors through brief, one-off encounters where long-term user modeling is infeasible. This research examines immediately interpretable behavioral cues of a robot that can evoke a sense of personalization without storing or profiling individual users. First, a video-based observational study of expert and novice museum docents identified service strategies that enable socially adaptive communication. Building on these insights, three controlled laboratory studies investigated how specific cues from robots influence user perception. A video-based controlled study examined how recognition accuracy shapes users’ social impressions of the robot’s intelligence. Additional studies based on the Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) method tested whether explanatory content aligned with participants’ background knowledge and whether explicit preference inquiry and memory-based continuity strengthened perceptions of personalization. Results showed that recognition accuracy improved social impressions, whereas knowledge alignment, explicit preference inquiry, and memory-based continuity cues increased perceived personalization. These findings demonstrate that micro-level personalization cues, interpretable within a short-term encounter, can support user-centered interaction design for social robots in public environments.