To be accepted in our everyday life and to be valuable interaction partners, robots should be able to display emotional and empathic behaviors. That is why there has been a great focus on developing empathy in robots in recent years. However, there is no consensus on how to measure how much a robot is considered to be empathic. In this context, we decided to construct a questionnaire which specifically measures the perception of a robot's empathy in human-robot interaction (HRI). Therefore we conducted pretests to generate items. These were validated by experts and will be further validated in an experimental setting.

The ever-increasing degree of automation in vehicles, with drivers delegating part of the manual driving task to automation, sets new research questions in terms of human–machine cooperation. Manual steering requires drivers to gaze at a distant road sections to ensure that the vehicle follows the road curvature and at a near road sections to maintain the vehicle within the lane limits. In this experiment, gaze behaviors engaged under highly automated driving (HAD) and manual driving conditions were compared. The results show a critical decrease of the number of gazes at the near road sections for the HAD condition compared to the manual driving condition. Two human-based highly automated “driving styles” were also compared, but did not translate into significant gaze behaviors modifications. Finally, no after-effect of the HAD was found on subsequent manual driving.