You Look Human, But Act Like a Machine: Agent Appearance and Behavior Modulate Different Aspects of Human–Robot Interaction

Abstract

Gaze following occurs automatically in social interactions, but the degree to which gaze is followed depends on whether an agent is perceived to have a mind, making its behavior socially more relevant for the interaction. Mind perception also modulates the attitudes we have toward others, and determines the degree of empathy, prosociality, and morality invested in social interactions. Seeing mind in others is not exclusive to human agents, but mind can also be ascribed to non-human agents like robots, as long as their appearance and/or behavior allows them to be perceived as intentional beings. Previous studies have shown that human appearance and reliable behavior induce mind perception to robot agents, and positively affect attitudes and performance in human–robot interaction. What has not been investigated so far is whether different triggers of mind perception have an independent or interactive effect on attitudes and performance in human–robot interaction. We examine this question by manipulating agent appearance (human vs. robot) and behavior (reliable vs. random) within the same paradigm and examine how congruent (human/reliable vs. robot/random) versus incongruent (human/random vs. robot/reliable) combinations of these triggers affect performance (i.e., gaze following) and attitudes (i.e., agent ratings) in human–robot interaction. The results show that both appearance and behavior affect human–robot interaction but that the two triggers seem to operate in isolation, with appearance more strongly impacting attitudes, and behavior more strongly affecting performance. The implications of these findings for human–robot interaction are discussed.

How attention gates social interactions

“…For example, Wiese et al . demonstrated reduced gaze following when gaze cues were perceived as being delivered by a robot (e.g., a computer program performing predetermined behaviors) rather than a human agent . These effects are reflected in neural activity, with increased activation of the TPJ when gaze is perceived as human controlled, and reduced magnitudes of the event‐related P1 and N170 components when gaze is perceived as computer controlled.…”

Human–machine metacommunication towards development of a human-like agent: A short review

“…In addition to the precise replication of human behavior, it seems to be important to consider the meaning of the behaviors of an agent from a metacommunication point of view. It is known that not only a human-like appearance but also natural behavior such as eye contact affects the perception of the agent by humans [39]. Changing the behavior of a robot (the ''embodied cues'') while interacting with a human affects the performance of the human [40].…”

Learning Socially Appropriate Robot Approaching Behavior Toward Groups using Deep Reinforcement Learning

“…Several works [5] [6] have shown that learning a model for physical interactions can help robots learn faster in the real-world. Secondly, in social interactions, humans have little tolerance for random behaviors [7], and lose interest quickly if the model deviates too much from † Authors contributed equally. *This work is partly supported by the Swedish Research Council (grant n. 2015-04378) and partly by the COIN project (RIT15-0133) funded by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research.…”