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Spatial communications are essential to the survival and social interaction of human beings. In science fiction and the near future, robots are supposed to be able to understand spatial languages to collaborate and cooperate with humans. However, it remains unknown whether human speakers regard robots as human-like social partners. In this study, human speakers describe target locations to an imaginary human or robot addressee under various scenarios varying in relative speaker–addressee cognitive burden. Speakers made equivalent perspective choices to human and robot addressees, which consistently shifted according to the relative speaker–addressee cognitive burden. However, speakers’ perspective choice was only significantly correlated to their social skills when the addressees were humans but not robots. These results suggested that people generally assume robots and humans with equal capabilities in understanding spatial descriptions but do not regard robots as human-like social partners.

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Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most prevalent and malignant brain tumor and is highly resistant to currently available treatment. In this study, we reveal that polypeptide N-acetylgalactosaminyltransferase 5 (GALNT2) expression level was elevated in GBM, IDH1 wildtype glioma, and GBM stem cells (GSCs). GALNT2 increased expression correlated with GBM patients’ unfavorable clinical outcomes. Functionally, targeting GALNT2 blocks GSCs cell proliferation, self-renewal, and malignant invasion through repressing CD44 expression. Most importantly, we first provide evidence suggesting that STAT3 activates GALNT2 expression at the transcriptional level by directly binding to the GALNT2 promoter. Through a rational screening, we found a GALNT2 inhibitor that dramatically suppresses GSCs self-maintenance in vitro and in vivo . Collectively, we uncovered the critical function of GALNT2 in promoting GSCs self-maintenance and GBM progression and may provide a new potential drug for GBM clinical therapy.