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Does Context Matter? Effects of Robot Appearance and Reliability on Social Attention Differs Based on Lifelikeness of Gaze Task

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Abstract

Social signals, such as changes in gaze direction, are essential cues to predict others’ mental states and behaviors (i.e., mentalizing). Studies show that humans can mentalize with nonhuman agents when they perceive a mind in them (i.e., mind perception). Robots that physically and/or behaviorally resemble humans likely trigger mind perception, which enhances the relevance of social cues and improves social-cognitive performance. The current experiments examine whether the effect of physical and behavioral influencers of mind perception on social-cognitive processing is modulated by the lifelikeness of a social interaction. Participants interacted with robots of varying degrees of physical (humanlike vs. robot-like) and behavioral (reliable vs. random) human-likeness while the lifelikeness of a social attention task was manipulated across five experiments. The first four experiments manipulated lifelikeness via the physical realism of the robot images (Study 1 and 2), the biological plausibility of the social signals (Study 3), and the plausibility of the social context (Study 4). They showed that humanlike behavior affected social attention whereas appearance affected mind perception ratings. However, when the lifelikeness of the interaction was increased by using videos of a human and a robot sending the social cues in a realistic environment (Study 5), social attention mechanisms were affected both by physical appearance and behavioral features, while mind perception ratings were mainly affected by physical appearance. This indicates that in order to understand the effect of physical and behavioral features on social cognition, paradigms should be used that adequately simulate the lifelikeness of social interactions.

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Notes

  1. The p value has been adjusted using the Bonferroni procedure because two Levene’s tests—one for each Physical Humanness level—have been conducted.

  2. This manipulation was chosen based on previous research that has shown that people are highly sensitive in differentiating biological from non-biological motion [50, 51].

  3. The p-value has been adjusted using the Bonferroni procedure because two Levene’s tests—one for each Physical Humanness level—have been conducted.

  4. The p-values have been adjusted using the Bonferroni procedure because two Levene’s tests—one for each Physical Humanness level—have been conducted.

  5. Interestingly, the results of Experiment 4 show a descriptive difference such that gaze-cueing effects were overall larger increase. This is not surprising as previous studies have shown that including contextual information has a positive effect on gaze-cueing effects [17].

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Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the hard-working research assistants that helped collect our sample.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    Abdulaziz Abubshait, Patrick P. Weis & Eva Wiese

  2. Italian Institute of Technology, Genoa, Italy

    Abdulaziz Abubshait

  3. Ulm University, Ulm, Germany

    Patrick P. Weis

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AA and EW conceptualized the study. PW programmed the experiments. AA and PW collected and analyzed the data. AA, EW, and PW interpreted the results and wrote the manuscript.

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Abubshait, A., Weis, P.P. & Wiese, E. Does Context Matter? Effects of Robot Appearance and Reliability on Social Attention Differs Based on Lifelikeness of Gaze Task. Int J of Soc Robotics 13, 863–876 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-020-00675-4

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