Cognitive Impact of Social Robots: How Anthropomorphism Boosts Performances

Abstract

Applying Research on Human Presence and Attention <AU: Please check that the edited section heading is appropriate.> Humanoid robots will likely take on increasingly important roles the lives of millions of people worldwide [1], [2]. While tremendous progress has been made in robotics science, the influence that these new humanoid robots may have on human cognition itself remains poorly understood. Evidence indicates [3]-[6] that the presence of a humanoid robot can lead to effects similar to those caused by human presence in terms of feelings [7] and task performance [3], [4]. However, this pioneering research has overlooked both the interaction between attentional processes and the anthropomorphic inferences that may be involved in the influence of a robotic presence. Here, we take advantage of research on human presence and attention and argue that the presence of humanoid robots may, even when the robots are passive, affect attentional processes, at least when the robot present is anthropomorphized to some extent.

Perception and Evaluation in Human–Robot Interaction: The Human–Robot Interaction Evaluation Scale (HRIES)—A Multicomponent Approach of Anthropomorphism

“…Second, in agreement with our hypotheses, we found higher Sociability, Agency, and Animacy attribution in parallel to less Disturbance when evaluating the social robot compared to the non-social one. These results are in line with previous studies using the same methodology in which participants attributed more anthropomorphic characteristics to the robots after a social-compared to a non-social interaction (Spatola et al 2018, Spatola et al, 2019. However, comparing to these previous results, the present scale seems more sensitive than those used in the above-mentioned study.…”

“…Studies showed that mechanistic dehumanization results in behavior such as indifference or lack of empathy towards individuals (Haslam, 2006;Haslam & Loughnan, 2014;Kteily, Bruneau, Waytz, & Cotterill, 2015). This de-humanization dimension has proved to be a reliable measure of social evaluation to predict socio-cognitive processes in an HRI situation, especially the Human nature/Mechanistic de-humanization distance measure (Spatola, Belletier, et al, 2019;Spatola, Monceau, & Ferrand, 2019).…”

“…In both conditions, the robot had exactly the same preprogrammed movements. The robot was a 1-meter MeccanoidG15KS humanoid that has already been used in similar experiments (Spatola, Belletier, et al, 2019Spatola, Monceau, et al, 2019). The operator was using o ma phone fo he con ol of he obo ge e and peech (b elec ing p e-established conversational scripts) in a coherent way.…”

Implicit Attitudes Towards Robots Predict Explicit Attitudes, Semantic Distance Between Robots and Humans, Anthropomorphism, and Prosocial Behavior: From Attitudes to Human–Robot Interaction

“…The experimenter asked NAO to grasp an object and to put it in a marked box. After this sequence, participants rated the robot on two scales presented in a counterbalanced order: the Robotic Social Attribute scale (RoSAS) [12] and the De-humanization scale based on Haslam taxonomy [29,42].…”

“…In order to assess the relationship between implicit attitudes towards robots and explicit perceptions of robots, along with the semantic priming task (implicit measure), we first assessed participants' self-reported attitudes, explicit semantic distance between robots and humans, and perceived robot anthropomorphism [41].To evaluate individuals' representation of robots, we used the theory of dehumanization that describes a disposition towards others in which the observer deprives the other of social or human characteristics. The dehumanization process, theorized by Haslam [29] is based on a modulation of the distance between the representation of what defines the concept of a 'human' and what defines the concept of an 'other' [29], and has previously been proved to be a reliable measure of robot evaluation [42].…”