Abstract
This chapter discusses the role of psychological experiments when designing artificial partners for haptic collaboration tasks, such as joint object manipulation. After an introduction, which motivates this line of research and provides according definitions, the first part of this chapter presents theoretical considerations on psychological experiments in the general design process of interactive artificial partners. Furthermore, challenges related to the specific research interest in haptic collaboration are introduced. Next, two concrete examples of psychological experiments are given: (a) A study where we examine whether dominance behavior depends on the interacting partner. The obtained results are discussed in relation to design guidelines for artificial partners. (b) An experiment which focuses on the evaluation of different configurations of the implemented artificial partner. Again the focus is on experimental challenges, especially measurements. In the conclusion the two roles of experiments in the design process of artificial partners for haptic tasks are contrasted.