Research has shown that, under certain circumstances, people can adopt the Intentional Stance towards robots and thus treat them as intentional agents. One factor potentially affecting individuals’ adoption of the Intentional Stance is the type of education (and presumably their prior knowledge about robots). In the present study, we investigated whether participants’ type of (formal) education modulated their adoption of the Intentional Stance. We asked two samples of participants to complete the InStance Test, to measure the individual tendency to attribute mental states to robots. One sample comprised individuals with a background in robotics, while the other comprised individuals with a background in psychotherapy. Before the beginning of the task, we recorded participants’ neural activity during a resting state. At the behavioral level, results showed that therapists scored higher in the InStance Test than roboticists, i.e., their likelihood of adopting the Intentional Stance was higher. This result was mirrored by participants’ neural activity during resting state, as we found higher power in the gamma frequency range (associated with mentalizing and the adoption of Intentional Stance) for therapists compared to roboticists.Therefore, we conclude that the type of education that promotes mentalizing skills increases the likelihood of attributing intentionality to robots.
Humanoid robots are a useful research tool to understand which factors trigger the adoption of the Intentional Stance (i.e., the attribution of mental states). The InStance Test (IST), assesses this with the isolated robot subscale and the social robot subscale -where higher scores reflect a greater tendency to adopt the Intentional Stance. Previous work found that when a human interacts with an embodied robot exhibiting human-like behaviour, their IST scores increase. However, it is not yet known whether this effect is robust to changes in embodiment or interaction. Subsequently, we administered both subscales before and after participants witnessed a humanoid robot exhibiting human-like behaviour. There was a significant increase in both scales after participants (1) interacted with the embodied robot, (2) watched a video of the robot interacting with a human and (3) watched a video of the robot without interaction. Secondly, to check there were no differences across the human-like experiments, we compared the differences of the magnitude of the IST score increase. We found no significant differences across the experiments. Additionally, we conducted follow-up control analyses' with the robot exhibiting machine-like behaviour, to ensure the increases were not due to exposure effects. We found no significant difference in the IST after participants (1) interacted with the embodied robot or (2) watched a video of the robot interacting with a human. These results show that the increased IST scores after witnessing iCub behaving in a human-like way, is not due to mere exposure and is robust to changes in embodiment and interaction.
Humanoid robots are a useful research tool to understand which factors trigger the adoption of the Intentional Stance (i.e., the attribution of mental states). The InStance Test (IST), assesses this with the isolated robot subscale and the social robot subscale - where higher scores reflect a greater tendency to adopt the Intentional Stance. Previous work found that when a human interacts with an embodied robot exhibiting human-like behaviour, their IST scores in-crease. However, it is not yet known whether this effect is robust to changes in embodiment or interaction. Subsequently, we administered both subscales before and after participants witnessed a humanoid robot exhibiting human-like behav-iour. There was a significant increase in both scales after participants (1) inter-acted with the embodied robot, (2) watched a video of the robot interacting with a human and (3) watched a video of the robot without interaction. Secondly, to check there were no differences across the human-like experiments, we compared the differences of the magnitude of the IST score increase. We found no signifi-cant differences across the experiments. Additionally, we conducted follow-up control analyses’ with the robot exhibiting machine-like behaviour, to ensure the increases were not due to exposure effects. We found no significant difference in the IST after participants (1) interacted with the embodied robot or (2) watched a video of the robot interacting with a human. These results show that the in-creased IST scores after witnessing iCub behaving in a human-like way, is not due to mere exposure and is robust to changes in embodiment and interaction.
Previous work shows that in some instances artificial agents, such as robots, can elicit higher-order socio-cognitive mechanisms, similar to those elicited by humans. This suggests that these socio-cognitive mechanisms, such as mentalizing processes, originally developed for interaction with other humans, might be flexibly (re-)used, or “hijacked”, for approaching this new category of interaction partners (Wykowska, 2020). In this study, we set out to identify neural markers of such flexible reuse of socio-cognitive mechanisms. We focused on fronto-parietal theta synchronization, as it has been proposed to be a substrate of cognitive flexibility in general (Fries, 2005). We analyzed EEG data from two experiments (Bossi et al., 2020; Roselli et al., submitted), in which participants completed a test measuring their individual likelihood to adopt the intentional stance towards robots, the intentional stance (IST) test. Our results show that participants with higher scores on the IST, indicating that they had higher likelihood of adopting the intentional stance towards a robot, had a significantly higher theta synchronization value, relative to participants with lower scores on the IST. These results suggest that long-range synchronization in the theta band might be a marker socio-cognitive process that can be flexibly applied towards non-human agents, such as robots.
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