Social robots become increasingly human-like in appearance and behaviour. However, a large body of research shows that these robots tend to elicit negative feelings of eeriness, danger, and threat. In the present study, we explored whether and how human-like appearance and mind-attribution contribute to these negative feelings and clarified possible underlying mechanisms. Participants were presented with pictures of mechanical, humanoid, and android robots, and physical anthropomorphism (Studies 1-3), attribution of mind perception of agency and experience (Studies 2 and 3), threat to human-machine distinctiveness, and damage to humans and their identity were assessed for all three robot types. Replicating earlier research, human-machine distinctiveness mediated the influence of anthropomorphic appearance on the perceived damage for humans and their identity, and this mediation was due to anthropomorphic appearance of the robot. Perceived agency and experience did not show similar mediating effects on human-machine distinctiveness, but a positive relation with perceived damage for humans and their identity. Possible explanations are discussed. Keywords Human/robot interaction • Uncanny valley • Mind perception • Need for distinctiveness 1 I, Robot: How Human Appearance and Mind Attribution Relate to the Perceived Danger of RobotsWatching the movie 'Ex Machina', you quickly perceive Ava, the android main character of the movie, as a real human with emotions and feelings. Anthropomorphising Ava in this way, that is to ascribe human-like characteristics and/or intentions to non-human agents, is a fundamental human process that spontaneously happens and increases our social connection with non-human agents [1]. Although highly evolved robots seem a vision of the future, we already interact with artificial intelligent agents on a regular basis (e.g., Siri, Apple's speaking assistant, Amazon's Alexa, or CaMeLi, an avatar designed to help elderly in daily life). Developments in robot technology are proceeding rapidly: 'Social robots', i.e., robots that are designed to interact and communicate with people [2], feature increasingly more human-like appearances and behaviour. While, these technical developments are especially interesting when it comes to maintaining and improving our quality of life, for example in health care or education, a large body of research also shows that social robots tend to elicit negative feelings of eeriness, danger, and threat [3][4][5][6][7]. In the present study, we investigated the factors that elicit these negative feelings and clarified possible underlying mechanisms, including the extent to which robots look human-like and the extent to which they are attributed with a mind.

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Previous research shows conflicting findings for the effect of font readability on comprehension and memory for language. It has been found that—perhaps counterintuitively–a hard to read font can be beneficial for language comprehension, especially for difficult language. Here we test how font readability influences the subjective experience of poetry reading. In three experiments we tested the influence of poem difficulty and font readability on the subjective experience of poems. We specifically predicted that font readability would have opposite effects on the subjective experience of easy versus difficult poems. Participants read poems which could be more or less difficult in terms of conceptual or structural aspects, and which were presented in a font that was either easy or more difficult to read. Participants read existing poems and subsequently rated their subjective experience (measured through four dependent variables: overall liking, perceived flow of the poem, perceived topic clarity, and perceived structure). In line with previous literature we observed a Poem Difficulty x Font Readability interaction effect for subjective measures of poetry reading. We found that participants rated easy poems as nicer when presented in an easy to read font, as compared to when presented in a hard to read font. Despite the presence of the interaction effect, we did not observe the predicted opposite effect for more difficult poems. We conclude that font readability can influence reading of easy and more difficult poems differentially, with strongest effects for easy poems.

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