Exploring Mediation Effect of Mental Alertness for Expressive Lights: Preliminary Results of LED Light Animations on Intention to Buy Hedonic Products and Choose between Healthy and Unhealthy Food

Expressive light has been explored in a handful of previous studies as a means for robots, especially appearance- constrained robots that are not able to employ human-like expressions, to convey internal states and interact with people. However, it is still unknown how different light expressions can affect a person's perception and behavior. In this poster, we explore this research question by studying the effects of different expressive light animations on people's intention to buy hedonic products and how they choose between healthy and unhealthy food. Our preliminary results show that participants assigned to a positive and low arousal light animation condition had a higher intention of purchasing hedonic products and were inclined to choose unhealthy over healthy food. Such findings are in line with previous literature in marketing research, suggesting that mental alertness mediates the effect of external stimuli on a person's behavioral intentions. Future work is thus required to evaluate such findings in a human-robot interaction context.