Follow the Yellow or Red Brick Road? Investigating the Impact of Narratives in a Guided Navigation Task

Sharing casual stories in conversations is a natural human behaviour that adds personal and unique details, while also offering measurable benefits such as improved memory recall and more positive social human-human interactions. However, as social robots become more common in everyday environments, it is unclear whether these stories, or narratives, have similar effects on human-robot interactions with embodied agents.

In this paper, we develop and run a pilot evaluation with a direction-giver agent to study the effects of narratives in the interaction. We use a Furhat robot with an LLM to guide participants through a virtual environment in Minecraft, providing instructions and answering follow-up questions throughout the task. We present preliminary results that show participants made fewer navigational mistakes and preferred narratives, and assess using virtual environments for tasks that typically require a physical one.