Robots As Intentional Agents: Using Neuroscientific Methods to Make Robots Appear More Social

Abstract

Robots are increasingly envisaged as our future cohabitants. However, while considerable progress has been made in recent years in terms of their technological realization, the ability of robots to interact with humans in an intuitive and social way is still quite limited. An important challenge for social robotics is to determine how to design robots that can perceive the user’s needs, feelings, and intentions, and adapt to users over a broad range of cognitive abilities. It is conceivable that if robots were able to adequately demonstrate these skills, humans would eventually accept them as social companions. We argue that the best way to achieve this is using a systematic experimental approach based on behavioral and physiological neuroscience methods such as motion/eye-tracking, electroencephalography, or functional near-infrared spectroscopy embedded in interactive human–robot paradigms. This approach requires understanding how humans interact with each other, how they perform tasks together and how they develop feelings of social connection over time, and using these insights to formulate design principles that make social robots attuned to the workings of the human brain. In this review, we put forward the argument that the likelihood of artificial agents being perceived as social companions can be increased by designing them in a way that they are perceived as intentional agents that activate areas in the human brain involved in social-cognitive processing. We first review literature related to social-cognitive processes and mechanisms involved in human–human interactions, and highlight the importance of perceiving others as intentional agents to activate these social brain areas. We then discuss how attribution of intentionality can positively affect human–robot interaction by (a) fostering feelings of social connection, empathy and prosociality, and by (b) enhancing performance on joint human–robot tasks. Lastly, we describe circumstances under which attribution of intentionality to robot agents might be disadvantageous, and discuss challenges associated with designing social robots that are inspired by neuroscientific principles.

More Than You Expect: Priors Influence on the Adoption of Intentional Stance Toward Humanoid Robots

“…After observing the behavior of the robot in a sequence of three P R E P R I N T photographs, participants were asked to rate if the behavior of the robot was motivated by a mechanical cause or by a mentalistic reason. Results showed that participants had a preference for mechanistic explanations, as has been presented previously in the literature ( [6], [18], [13]). Interestingly, in some scenarios people tended to explain the behavior of iCub in mentalistic terms.…”

“…More recently, particular interest has been driven towards how and when humanoid robots evoke mentalistic explanations of behavior [11][12][13][14]. Research with this type of robots is crucial as those share the most physical features and behavior with human agents and also because these robots would be the first ones that will interact with people in social contexts.…”

Seeing minds in others: Mind perception modulates low-level social-cognitive performance and relates to ventromedial prefrontal structures

“…For example, mind perception has been shown to influence prosocial behaviors (Bering & Johnson, 2005;Epley, Waytz, Akalis, & Cacioppo, 2008;Graham & Haidt, 2010;Gray, Young, & Waytz, 2012;Shariff & Norenzayan, 2007), reactions to observing negative consequences for others (Cushman, 2008;Gray & Wegner, 2008;Ohtsubo, 2007), and the motivation to perpetuate moral standards (Haley & Fessler, 2005). Similarly, attitudes and performance in interactions with nonhuman agents can be improved when the agents trigger mind perception by displaying human features or behaviors (Bennewitz, Faber, Joho, Schreiber, & Behnke, 2005;Fussell, Kiesler, Setlock, & Yew, 2008;Huang & Thomaz, 2011;Mutlu, Forlizzi, & Hodgins, 2006;Mutlu, Kanda, Forlizzi, Hodgins, & Ishiguro, 2012;Pfeiffer-Leßmann, Pfeiffer, & Wachsmuth, 2018;Sidner, Kidd, Lee, & Lesh, 2004;Staudte & Crocker, 2011;Wiese, Metta, & Wykowska, 2017;Yamazaki, Yamazaki, Burdelski, Kuno, & Fukushima, 2010). In contrast, agents not triggering mind perception negatively impact performance in social interactions (Caruana et al, 2016;Wiese et al, 2012;Wykowska et al, 2014) and fail to induce social facilitation (Bartneck, 2003;Park & Catrambone, 2007;Riether, Hegel, Wrede, & Horstmann, 2012;Woods, Dautenhahn, & Kaouri, 2005).…”

Humanization of robots: Is it really such a good idea?

“…The humanization of robots, or the representation of (parts) robots as humans, can have several positive effects, contributing to the successful adoption of robots by our society (Paiva, Mascarenhas, Petisca, Correia, & Alves‐Oliveira, ; Robert, ). Many scholars working with robots aim to create an autonomous human‐like robot capable of mimicking human behaviors and emotions (Admoni & Scassellati, ; Breazeal & Scassellati, ; Fong et al, ; Goodrich & Schultz, ; Mavridis, ; Oliveira et al, ; Wiese, Metta, & Wykowska, ).…”