Human-like interactions prompt people to take a robot's perspective

Tian Ye; Takashi Minato; Kurima Sakai; Hidenobu Sumioka; Antonia Hamilton; Hiroshi Ishiguro

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1190620

Human-like interactions prompt people to take a robot's perspective

Front Psychol. 2023 Oct 10:14:1190620. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1190620. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Tian Ye^{1

2}, Takashi Minato³, Kurima Sakai⁴, Hidenobu Sumioka⁴, Antonia Hamilton², Hiroshi Ishiguro^{4

5}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychology, Shandong Normal University, Jinan, China.
² Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
³ RIKEN Information R&D and Strategy Headquarters, Guardian Robot Project, Keihanna Science City, Kyoto, Japan.
⁴ Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories, Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International, Keihanna Science City, Kyoto, Japan.
⁵ Graduate School of Engineering Science, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan.

Abstract

The increasing need for human-robot interaction requires not only robots to understand how humans think, but also humans to understand robots. Interestingly, little attention has been given to how humans interpret robots' behaviors. In this study, we adopted a social mental rotation task and investigated whether socially engaging behaviors could influence how people take a robot's perspectives. In a real lab, two android robots with neutral appearance sat opposite each other by a table with conflicting perspectives. Before the participant started the experiment, one of the robots behaved more interactively than the other by showing more socially engaging behaviors. Then the participant was required to identify rotated normal or mirrored digits presented inbetween the two robots. Results revealed a significant interactive effect between the digits type (normal; mirrored) and robot type (interactive; noninteractive). When digits were oriented to the interactive robot, we found a larger RT difference between normal and mirrored digits. In general, these findings suggested that robots' interactive behaviors could influence how people spontaneously consider the robot's perspective. Future studies may further consider how interactive behaviors can shape human-robot relationships and facilitate human-robot interaction.

Keywords: anthropomorphism; human-robot interaction; humanisation; perspective-taking; social behavior.

Grants and funding

This project was sponsored by the EPS travel grant, the China Scholarship Council and the Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC: No.32100862). This work was also supported by JST Moonshot R&D Grant Number JPMJMS2011 (experiment design and manuscript revision) and ERATO the ISHIGURO symbiotic human-robot interaction project Grant Number JPMJER1401 (programming the robot’s movements).