Human but not robotic gaze facilitates action prediction

Emmanuele Tidoni; Henning Holle; Michele Scandola; Igor Schindler; Loron Hill; Emily S Cross

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2022.104462

Human but not robotic gaze facilitates action prediction

iScience. 2022 May 25;25(6):104462. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2022.104462. eCollection 2022 Jun 17.

Authors

Emmanuele Tidoni¹, Henning Holle², Michele Scandola³, Igor Schindler², Loron Hill¹, Emily S Cross^{4

5}

Affiliations

¹ Human Technology Laboratory, Department of Psychology, University of Hull, Hull HU6 7RX, UK.
² Department of Psychology, University of Hull, Hull HU6 7RX, UK.
³ NPSY.Lab.VR & BASIC_NPSY, Department of Human Sciences, University of Verona, 37129 Verona, Italy.
⁴ Department of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia.
⁵ Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QB, UK.

Abstract

Do people ascribe intentions to humanoid robots as they would to humans or non-human-like animated objects? In six experiments, we compared people's ability to extract non-mentalistic (i.e., where an agent is looking) and mentalistic (i.e., what an agent is looking at; what an agent is going to do) information from gaze and directional cues performed by humans, human-like robots, and a non-human-like object. People were faster to infer the mental content of human agents compared to robotic agents. Furthermore, although the absence of differences in control conditions rules out the use of non-mentalizing strategies, the human-like appearance of non-human agents may engage mentalizing processes to solve the task. Overall, results suggest that human-like robotic actions may be processed differently from humans' and objects' behavior. These findings inform our understanding of the relevance of an object's physical features in triggering mentalizing abilities and its relevance for human-robot interaction.

Keywords: Robotics; cognitive neuroscience; research methodology social sciences.