Interaction with a Moving Object Affects One’s Perception of Its Animacy

Abstract

Sometimes we regard just an artifact as a lifelike one and other times not; it is considered to depend on how we deal and interact with the artifact. We experimentally examined whether differences in the manner of interacting with a moving robot (operating it or only observing its movements) influenced one's perception of the robot's animacy and, if so, whether the strength of this influence depended on the apparent goal-directedness of the robot's movements. We found that people only observing the robot perceived it most animated when its movements seemed most goal-directed but that people controlling the robot perceived it more animated when 1/f noise made its movements seem less goal-directed. Our perception of a moving object's animacy thus depends on whether we interact with the object or just observe it while someone else interacts with it. This result suggests that robotics researchers should design how a robot interacts with its users, in order to elicit higher degree of animacy perception for the robot.

Communication of Emotion in Social Robots through Simple Head and Arm Movements

“…To the last point, Fukuda and Ueda [52] found that laypeople perceive a robot's animacy differently depending on whether they are controlling the robot or whether they are just observing it-suggesting that gesture design may be particularly challenging for those without experience. We therefore hypothesize that puppeteers will be more adept at authoring effective emotional gestures for our robot.…”

When triangles become human

“…Both results could be explained by a decrease in self-other overlap with an increase in distance between actor and co-actor, which would be in line with our argumentation that an increase in self-other overlap invoked by perspective taking fosters action corepresentation. The objects used in the studies mentioned above are perfectly suitable to ascribe intentionality, and research has shown that predictability increases perceived intentionality (Fukuda & Ueda, 2010;Hard, Tversky, & Lang, 2006). Although a control condition was included in which a noiseless metronome was placed next to the participant, it could still be speculated whether an object with a human-like face (i.e., a Lucky Cat), and a noisy metronome are not more prone to Action Co-representation for Objects 12 ascribe intentionality (see Epley et al, 2007).…”

Abstract Feelings Emerging from Haptic Stimulation

“…This feeling of the animacy of inanimate objects has been well investigated in the context of animacy perception (Blakemore et al, 2003;Gao et al, 2010;Gao & Scholl, 2011;Heider & Simmel, 1944;Scholl & Tremoulet, 2000). In animacy perception, given the mutually interactive motion of multiple visual objects, human observers sense intention or sociality in artificial visual objects (Fukuda & Ueda, 2010;Gao et al, 2009;Santos et al, 2008). Furthermore, recent studies have reported that a particular motion pattern of a single visual object could induce animacy perception (Tremoulet & Feldman, 2000), which implies that apparently higher cognitive appreciation of complex properties such as animacy may originate from low-level sensory processes.…”