Does the Presence of Social Agents Improve Cognitive Performance on a Vigilance Task?

Mandell, Arielle R.; Smith, Melissa A.; Martini, Molly C.; Shaw, Tyler H.; Wiese, Eva

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-25554-5_42

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…The observation that appearance and behavior influence how we interact with non-human agents is in line with previous reports showing that the two variables affect agent ratings ( Looser and Wheatley, 2010 ; Waytz et al, 2010 ; Hackel et al, 2014 ; Martini et al, 2016 ), and performance ( Kiesler et al, 2008 ; Morewedge, 2009 ; Süßenbach and Schönbrodt, 2014 ; Wiese et al, 2014 ; Mandell et al, 2015 ). Surprisingly, however, the current study shows that appearance and behavior differ significantly in their capacity to modulate performance versus mind judgments, with appearance having a stronger impact on agent ratings and behavior having a stronger impact on performance.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

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

2017

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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.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

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

2017

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“…The observation that participants with high WMC are better able to exert top-down control in more cognitively demanding conditions is in line with previous studies, stating that top-down control of gaze following depends on the context [6,9,20,24,31,32,34]. It is also in line with the categorical ambiguity explanation for the Uncanny Valley, which states that agents of 70-80% humanness are hardest to categorize given that they are human-like enough to evoke perceptions of humanness, but not perfectly human, resulting in categorization ambiguity [18,21,22] and cognitive conflict [19]. With regard to the current data, this means that top-down control abilities might only be impaired when the gazer's physical appearance is so ambiguous that categorizing it as human versus non-human consumes significant amounts of cognitive resources, and that participants with high WMC are more able to make up for this significant loss of resources than participants with low WMC [19].…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

“…The observation that agents of around 70% physical humanness seem to drain cognitive resources more strongly than other agents (i.e., most positive difference scores) can be explained within the framework of the uncanny valley theory, which states that agents that are human-like, but not perfectly human (i.e., 60-80% physical humanness) elicit feelings of eeriness [20,24], potentially due to their categorical ambiguity (i.e., hard to categorize as human versus robot; [18,21,22]). In line with this observation, Mandell et al [19] have shown that agents of about 70% humanness indeed drain cognitive resources on a sustained attention task, while none of the other agents on the human-robot morph had a comparable detrimental effect on cognitive resources.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 73%

Differences in Working-Memory Capacity Modulate Top-down Control of Social Attention

Momen

Wiese

2018

Proceedings of the Technology, Mind, and Society

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Gaze following, or our ability to attend to where others are looking can be top-down controlled by context information about the social relevance of the gaze signal. In particular, it has been shown that gaze signals are followed more strongly when the gazer is believed to have a mind with the ability to show intentional behavior (i.e., human) compared to being pre-programmed (i.e., robot). Perceiving human traits in nonhuman agents (i.e., anthropomorphism) occurs naturally in human-robot interaction, where it has positive effects on performance. It can also attenuate performance, if the robot is designed in a way that makes it hard to categorize as human or nonhuman (e.g., humanoid appearance), and inflicts additional working memory load due to categorical ambiguity. Here, we examine if gaze signals of ambiguous humanoid agents are followed differently than those of unambiguous human or robot agents, and to what extent gaze following is affected by individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC). We assume participants with high versus low WMC to be more capable of suppressing reflexive gaze following behaviors to the cued location in a counterpredictive paradigm (where targets appear with high likelihoods at uncued locations), particularly when being cued by humanoid gazers (topdown control, which requires cognitive resources). While the analysis showed no effect of categorical ambiguity on top-down control abilities overall, it revealed that participants with low WMC had weaker top-down control than participants with high WMC for the most ambiguous humanoid agent. The results are discussed with regard to the design of social agents and human-robot interaction.

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“…Physical, behavioral and context features not only affect mind perception, but have also been shown to change the social relevance ascribed to others' actions and consequently modulate social-cognitive processing [11,12,37]. Increasing an agent's physical human-likeness is associated with enhanced social cognitive processing [20], as well as increased activation in social brain areas [11], but it can also have negative consequences when an agent's appearance is categorically ambiguous and cannot easily be classified as "human" or "nonhuman" [26,38]. With regard to behavioral factors, robots emulating humanlike behaviors have a positive effect on social-cognitive processes.…”

Section: Causes and Effects Of Mind Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does context matter? Effects of robot appearance and reliability on social attention differs based on lifelikeness of gaze task

Abubshait¹,

Weis²,

Wiese³

2020

Preprint

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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 non-human 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 ex-periments 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 con-text (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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Does the Presence of Social Agents Improve Cognitive Performance on a Vigilance Task?

Cited by 9 publications

References 17 publications

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

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

Differences in Working-Memory Capacity Modulate Top-down Control of Social Attention

Does context matter? Effects of robot appearance and reliability on social attention differs based on lifelikeness of gaze task

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