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In everyday life, we often observe and learn from interactions between other individuals –– so-called third-party encounters. As robots are poised to become an increasingly familiar presence in our daily lives, third-party encounters between other people and robots might offer a valuable approach to influence people’s behaviours and attitudes towards robots. Here, we conducted an online experiment where participants (n = 48) watched videos of human-robot dyads interacting in a cooperative or competitive manner. Following this observation, we measured participants’ behaviour and attitudes towards the human and robotic agents. First, participants played a game with the agents to measure whether their behaviour was affected by their observed encounters. Second, participants’ attitudes toward the agents were measured before and after the game. We found that the third-party encounters influenced behaviour during the game but not attitudes towards the observed agents. Participants showed more effort towards robots than towards humans, especially when the human and robot agents were framed as competitive in the observation phase. Our study suggests that people’s behaviours towards robots can be shaped by the mere observation of third-party encounters between robots and other people.

7Pupil size changes under different light conditions. Whereas this pupillary light response (PLR) has 8 long been regarded to be influenced by luminance only, recent studies indicated the PLR is also 9 modulated by cognitive factors such as the allocation of spatial attention. This attentional modulation 10 of the PLR has previously been hypothesized to facilitate detection and discrimination of visual 11 information. Here, we replicated the finding that the pupil dilates when a cue is presented at the dark 12 side of a screen and constricts when the cue is presented at the bright side, even when the eyes are 13 fixated at the center. Furthermore, we investigated whether this modulation of the PLR, evoked by 14 exogenous shifts of covert attention, facilitates perception operationalized as detection performance for 15 threshold stimuli. Results showed that a larger pupil was indeed related to increased detection 16 performance, although this effect was restricted to conditions in which both cue and target appeared on 17 a dark surface. Our findings are in line with the notion that pupil dilations improve detectability, 18 whereas pupil constrictions enhance discriminability of small stimuli. 19

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