The Effect of Individual Differences and Repetitive Interactions on Explicit and Implicit Attitudes Towards Robots

Abstract

The exploitation of Social Assistive Robotics (SAR) will bring to the emergence of a new category of users, namely experts in clinical rehabilitation, who do not have a background in robotics. The aim of the present study was twofold. First, we were interested in addressing individual differences in the attitudes towards robots this new category of users. The second aim of the study was to investigate whether repetitive interactions with the robot during the SAR intervention would affect attitudes towards robots. To this end, we evaluated both explicit and implicit attitudes towards robots in a group of therapists rehabilitating children with neurodevelopmental disorders. The evaluation took place before they started a SAR intervention (T0), ongoing (T1), and at the end of it (T2). Explicit attitudes were evaluated using self-reported questionnaires, whereas implicit attitudes were operationalized as the perception of the robot as a social partner and implicit associations regarding the concept of "robot". Results showed that older ages and previous experience with robots were associated with more negative attitudes toward robots and less willingness to perceive the robot as a social agent. Explicit measures did not vary across time, whereas implicit measures were modulated by increased exposure to robots. Specifically, the more the clinicians were exposed to the robot the more the robot was considered a social partner similarly to the human player. Moreover, across time, users' memory association between the concept of a robot and mechanical attributes became weaker. In conclusion, our results suggest that individual differences towards robots in a group of SAR users play a crucial role in both explicit and implicit attitudes. Moreover, they also suggest that increased exposure to robots modulates implicit but not explicit attitudes.

A study on social inclusion of humanoid robots: a novel embodied adaptation of the Cyberball paradigm

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“…These experiences can steer a mental representation of the artificial agent that, in turn, might influence our spontaneity in filling in self-report questionnaires [85] but also modulate our implicit attitudes towards the agents themselves [86]. Future research should strategically control this.…”