Exploring the Perceptions of Cognitive and Affective Capabilities of Four, Real, Physical Robots with a Decreasing Degree of Morphological Human Likeness

Abstract

This paper describes an investigation of student perceptions of the cognitive and affective capabilities of four robots that have a decreasing degree of morphological human likeness. We showed and illustrated the robots (i.e., InMoov, Padbot, Joy Robot and Turtlebot) to 62 students. After showing the students each of these robots, and explaining their main features and capabilities, we administered a fill-in questionnaire to the students. Our main hypothesis was that the perception of a robot’s cognitive and affective capabilities varied in correspondence with their appearance and in particular with their different degree of human likeness. The main results of this study indicate that the scores attributed to the cognitive and emotional capabilities of these robots are not modulated correspondingly to their different morphological similarity to humans. Furthermore, overall, the scores given to all of these robots regarding their ability to explicate mental functions are low, and even lower scores are given to their ability to feel emotions. There is a split between InMoov, the robot which has the highest degree of human likeness, and all of the others. Our results also indicate that: (1) morphological similarity of a robot to humans is not perceived automatically as such by observers, which is not considered a value in itself for the robot; and (2) even at lower levels of robot–human likeness, an uncanny valley effect arises but is quite mitigated by curiosity.

How the social robot Sophia is mediated by a YouTube video

“…Let us use our research questions as a guide to structure the discussion of the results. As to RQ1, “Is Sophia perceived, after the video, as a highly anthropomorphized robot?,” the outcome of the first free association exercise confirms that, as reached in the previous study with physical robots with different degrees of human-likeness (Fortunati et al, 2021b) and in another study about the virtual assistant Alexa (Fortunati et al, forthcoming), the human-likeness of Sophia was not salient to observers. Thus, although videos, as we reported at the beginning, may have a distortive effect on people’s perceptions, this study shows that the impression of Sophia was not of a highly human-like robot.…”

“…However, in this dumb zone, usually we find socially controversial terms. What is more important is that these findings resonate with those of other researches in which the free association exercise has been applied (Fortunati et al, 2021b, forthcoming) and which documented that (1) the morphological similarity of a robot to humans was not perceived as such and (2) robots or voice-based assistants, characterized by gender cues such as facial features or voice, did not elicit a perception of gender. The hypotheses that can be advanced to interpret these findings are several: maybe the impression of Sophia as a robot is dominant on the potential perception of typically human cues; or, probably, as Lee et al (2005) argue, not only the social cues that humanoid robots emit are relevant but also the information people use to create the mental model of humanoid robots is relevant too.…”

“…Sophia's physical beauty incorporates a conventional notion of a woman's beauty as it was made popular by the media system in the 1950s-1960s (Jones, 2010). She is designed to be similar to a woman, not just physically (level at which she replicates a binary and traditional femininity), but also in her identity, which is constituted fundamentally by two elements (Fortunati et al, 2021b). First, she has a woman's name and this stresses her similarity to a woman (see also Fritz, 2018).…”

“…The idea from which this research started is the outcome of a study with four robots having different degrees of similarity with humans (Fortunati et al, 2021b). One of the findings was that the morphological similarity of a robot to humans was not automatically perceived by observers as such and another was that, although these robots were physical robots, participants evoked a disembodied image of them.…”

A Survey on Recent Advances in Social Robotics

“…Indeed, to be accepted in social contexts, robots need to show degrees of intelligence, morphology, or usefulness that can be judged positively by users, not to mention cultural influences on expectations towards and responses to social robots [197]. The study published in 2021 in [198] focused on the perception that humans have of the cognitive and affective abilities of robots and began with the hypothesis that this perception varied in accordance with the degree of human-likeness that robots have. However, the results obtained with students on four robots used in the study did not prove this hypothesis.…”