Coordinating With a Robot Partner Affects Neural Processing Related to Action Monitoring

Abstract

Robots start to play a role in our social landscape, and they are progressively becoming responsive, both physically and socially. It begs the question of how humans react to and interact with robots in a coordinated manner and what the neural underpinnings of such behavior are. This exploratory study aims to understand the differences in human-human and human-robot interactions at a behavioral level and from a neurophysiological perspective. For this purpose, we adapted a collaborative dynamical paradigm from the literature. We asked 12 participants to hold two corners of a tablet while collaboratively guiding a ball around a circular track either with another participant or a robot. In irregular intervals, the ball was perturbed outward creating an artificial error in the behavior, which required corrective measures to return to the circular track again. Concurrently, we recorded electroencephalography (EEG). In the behavioral data, we found an increased velocity and positional error of the ball from the track in the human-human condition vs. human-robot condition. For the EEG data, we computed event-related potentials. We found a significant difference between human and robot partners driven by significant clusters at fronto-central electrodes. The amplitudes were stronger with a robot partner, suggesting a different neural processing. All in all, our exploratory study suggests that coordinating with robots affects action monitoring related processing. In the investigated paradigm, human participants treat errors during human-robot interaction differently from those made during interactions with other humans. These results can improve communication between humans and robot with the use of neural activity in real-time.

Brain computer interface to distinguish between self and other related errors in human agent collaboration

“…The distinction between the two is necessary for a system to identify the stage at which an error occurred-at the level where the user intent is detected or at the level where the system executes the decoded intent. To support the results that we presented, it would be beneficial to do a follow-up study with a robot as a collaborator 54 since it was earlier found that misinterpretations of user commands displayed on a screen or used to control humanoid robot evoke ErrPs with different characteristics 26 , and that the response in collaboration with a robot is different from the response in collaboration with a human 55 .…”

The robot eyes don't have it. The presence of eyes on collaborative robots yields marginally higher user trust but lower performance

“…Such synchronization is suggested to underlie human empathy and the ability to coordinate actions. Likewise, brain oscillations have been shown to differ during interactions with robots vs. other humans [ 36 ] suggesting that the brain makes a substantial difference between those two agent classes. This may be one reason why eyes on a non-sentient agent are not perceived as natural, just as the uncanny valley model would suggest.…”

“…The “ uncanny valley ” has been described for social HMI and shown to affect acceptability and trust [ 34 ]. There is evidence showing that human brain activities are modulated by whether they interacted with a human or a robotic agent [ 36 ], which suggests that human preference for interacting with humans might be indeed “hardwired” in the brain. How strong is this preference when it comes to cooperative behavior?…”

Placebo or Assistant? Generative AI Between Externalization and Anthropomorphization

“…In that study, participants using the fake augmentation system actually believed in the benefits of the technological artifact, even after having completed the card game. Villa et al (2023) even were able to show that being told to utilize augmentation technology affects brain waves as measured using electroencephalography (see also Czeszumski et al, 2021, for related findings on action monitoring from human-robot interactions).…”