Repetitive Robot Behavior Impacts Perception of Intentionality and Gaze-Related Attentional Orienting

Abstract

Gaze behavior is an important social signal between humans as it communicates locations of interest. People typically orient their attention to where others look as this informs about others' intentions and future actions. Studies have shown that humans can engage in similar gaze behavior with robots but presumably more so when they adopt the intentional stance toward them (i.e., believing robot behaviors are intentional). In laboratory settings, the phenomenon of attending toward the direction of others' gaze has been examined with the use of the gaze-cueing paradigm. While the gaze-cueing paradigm has been successful in investigating the relationship between adopting the intentional stance toward robots and attention orienting to gaze cues, it is unclear if the repetitiveness of the gaze-cueing paradigm influences adopting the intentional stance. Here, we examined if the duration of exposure to repetitive robot gaze behavior in a gaze-cueing task has a negative impact on subjective attribution of intentionality. Participants performed a short, medium, or long face-to-face gaze-cueing paradigm with an embodied robot while subjective ratings were collected pre and post the interaction. Results show that participants in the long exposure condition had the smallest change in their intention attribution scores, if any, while those in the short exposure condition had a positive change in their intention attribution, indicating that participants attributed more intention to the robot after short interactions. The results also show that attention orienting to robot gaze-cues was positively related to how much intention was attributed to the robot, but this relationship became more negative as the length of exposure increased. In contrast to subjective ratings, the gaze-cueing effects (GCEs) increased as a function of the duration of exposure to repetitive behavior. The data suggest a tradeoff between the desired number of trials needed for observing various mechanisms of social cognition, such as GCEs, and the likelihood of adopting the intentional stance toward a robot.

Examining Social Cognition with Embodied Robots: Does Prior Experience with a Robot Impact Feedback-associated Learning in a Gambling Task?

“…Specifically, it is possible that the fact that the participants played engaging games (Simon Says and playing with Cozmo) in the control and one-time interaction (but not the repeated interaction) conditions immediately before performing the gambling task may have elevated their arousal and in turn impacted feedback processing. Additionally, worse learning outcomes specifically for the "Other" condition after repeated interaction would be in line with recent studies showing that repeated exposure to social robots negatively affects social cognitive processes (Abubshait & Wykowska, 2020). We suggest that reduced feedback monitoring for "Other" could be attributable to devaluation of the reward following repeated interactions with the robot.…”

Irrelevant Robot Signals in a Categorization Task Induce Cognitive Conflict in Performance, Eye Trajectories, the N2 Component of the EEG Signal, and Frontal Theta Oscillations

“…Specifically, observers were able to exert top-down modulation of gaze-cueing when interacting with a robot endowed with characteristics that increased its social relevance (Abubshait & Wiese, 2017;Wiese et al, 2018;Wiese et al, 2012;Wykowska et al, 2014). These findings are also extended in more ecologically valid paradigms that measure gaze-cueing in real Human-Robot Interaction settings (Abubshait & Wykowska, 2020;Kompatsiari et al, 2017;2018). It has also been shown that robots can use social signals in more complex scenarios (i.e., head/gaze cue) to effectively convey messages during storytelling (Mutlu et al, 2006), to facilitate joint actions (Boucher et al, 2012), improve the perception of competence (Huang & Thomaz, 2011) and provide hints to solve tasks (Mutlu et al, 2006).…”

Collaboratively framed interactions increase the adoption of intentional stance towards robots

“…This study fits in with prior HRI literature that investigates under which conditions people adopt the intentional stance towards robots. Prior work has shown that factors such as a robots' physical appearance [1], behavior [16], exposure to reactive [42], or repetitive behavior [43] influence attribution of intentionality. Here, we illustrate that framing a task in a collaborative manner increases our tendency to adopt the intentional stance towards the robot.…”