Beliefs about the Minds of Others Influence How We Process Sensory Information

Wykowska, Agnieszka; Wiese, Eva; Prosser, Aaron; Müller, Hermann J.

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0094339

Cited by 169 publications

(208 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…We found that the N170 -an early occipitotemporal brain response to 114 visual information -was larger in response to gaze shifts in the group who believed the 115 virtual character was human-controlled (see Wykowska et al, 2014 for similar findings). We 116 also found that the P350 -a later response measured over centro-parietal sites -was sensitive 117 to joint attention success only in the group who believed that the virtual character was 118 human-controlled.…”

Section: States? 81supporting

confidence: 57%

Human agency beliefs influence behaviour during virtual social interactions

Caruana

Spirou

Brock

2017

Preprint

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In recent years, with the emergence of relatively inexpensive and accessible virtual reality technologies, it is now possible to deliver compelling and realistic simulations of human-tohuman interaction. Neuroimaging studies have shown that, when participants believe they are interacting via a virtual interface with another human agent, they show different patterns of brain activity compared to when they know that their virtual partner is computer-controlled. The suggestion is that users adopt an "intentional stance" by attributing mental states to their virtual partner. However, it remains unclear how beliefs in the agency of a virtual partner influence participants' behaviour and subjective experience of the interaction. We investigated this issue in the context of a cooperative "joint attention" game in which participants interacted via an eye tracker with a virtual onscreen partner, directing each other's eye gaze to different screen locations. Half of the participants were correctly informed that their partner was controlled by a computer algorithm ("Computer" condition). The other half were misled into believing that the virtual character was controlled by a second participant in another room ("Human" condition).Those in the "Human" condition were slower to make eye contact with their partner and more likely to try and guide their partner before they had established mutual eye contact than participants in the "Computer" condition. They also responded more rapidly when their partner was guiding them, although the same effect was also found for a control condition in which they responded to an arrow cue. Results confirm the influence of human agency beliefs on behaviour in this virtual social interaction context. They further suggest that researchers and developers attempting to simulate social interactions should consider the impact of agency beliefs on user experience in other social contexts, and their effect on the achievement of the application's goals.PeerJ Preprints | https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3018v1 | CC BY 4.0 Open Access |

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Section: States? 81supporting

confidence: 57%

Human agency beliefs influence behaviour during virtual social interactions

Caruana

Spirou

Brock

2017

Preprint

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“…According to Wykowska et al [6] an intentional stance is required before people can attribute mental states to agents, and it was shown that beliefs about agency affect the effectiveness of a gaze cue [4,6]. The effects of gaze timing on the onset of imitation in our study are much larger than those observed using a gaze cueing paradigm, which is about 15 ms [4].…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 61%

“…But being able to extract the goal of a robot's movement is hardly sufficient to claim that people treat the robot as a 'social agent' rather than a machine. To attribute mental states to (artificial) agents requires an intentional stance [6]. ToM can be regarded as the fundamental link for achieving successful social interaction (in HHI), which ST cannot fully explain [3,19].…”

Section: Social Gaze Cuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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On the Imitation of Goal Directed Movements of a Humanoid Robot

Bao

Cuijpers

2017

Int J of Soc Robotics

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Interacting with a social robot should give people a better understanding of the robot's actions and intentions. In terms of human-human interaction (HHI), people can interpret actions of others in an effortless way. However, it is still unclear whether people can do the same with humanoid robots. Imitation (of the robot's actions) provides us with an intuitive means for solving this puzzle, because it is closely related to interpreting another's actions. In the study of human imitation, the theory of goal-directed imitation holds that the imitator tends to imitate the action goals whenever the action goals are salient, otherwise people tend to imitate the action means. We investigated this theory for human robot interaction by manipulating the presence and absence of the goal object when people imitate the robot's pointing gestures. The results showed that the presence of a goal object reduces people's goal errors. Moreover, we found that most people tend to match their action means rather than the goals of the robot's action. To ensure that participants considered the robot as a social agent, we designed a natural interaction task where the turn-taking cue was included: we let the robot look at the human after completing the pointing gesture at varying latencies. As expected, we found that the earlier the robot gazes at people, the shorter the reaction time of people was to start to imitate. Our results show that people are responsive to a robot's social gaze cues, and that they are responsive to the action goals of robots, although not as much as in HHI.

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“…Indeed, interacting with agents assumed to be "intentional" is fundamentally different from interacting with non-intentional objects [6]. For example, it has been shown that intentionality-attribution and underlying mentalizing influence sensory processing to become "social perception", an altered understanding of each other's actions [19,14], which is also known as an "intentional stance" [4]. Clearly, these processes play an important role not only in solitary observation events, in which they have been studied mostly so far, but even more so in continuous online interaction [8,13].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling a Social Brain for Interactive Agents: Integrating Mirroring and Mentalizing

Kahl

Kopp

2015

Intelligent Virtual Agents

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Abstract. Human interaction has a distinct collaborative quality based on the attribution of communicative intentionality. Two networks in the human brain are often described as part of the "social brain": the mirror system for recognizing intentional behavior and the mentalizing (theory of mind) system for processing it. We equip virtual agents with both systems and model their interaction during embodied communication. Results of simulation experiments demonstrate how higher orders of theory of mind lead to more robustness of communication by enabling interactive grounding processes.

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Beliefs about the Minds of Others Influence How We Process Sensory Information

Cited by 169 publications

References 43 publications

Human agency beliefs influence behaviour during virtual social interactions

Human agency beliefs influence behaviour during virtual social interactions

On the Imitation of Goal Directed Movements of a Humanoid Robot

Modeling a Social Brain for Interactive Agents: Integrating Mirroring and Mentalizing

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