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

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Social Robotics (ICSR 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11876))

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Abstract

Humans predict others’ behavior based on mental state inferences and expectations created on previous interactions. On the brink of the introduction of artificial agents in our social environment, the question of whether humans would use similar cognitive mechanisms to interact with these agents gains relevance. Recent research showed that people could indeed explain the behavior of a robot in mentalistic terms. However, there is scarce evidence regarding how expectations modulate the adoption of these mentalistic explanations. The present study aims at creating a questionnaire that measures expectations regarding the capabilities of the robot and testing whether these priors modulate the adoption of the intentional stance toward artificial agents. We found that individual expectations might influence the adoption of mentalistic explanations. After a show period of observation, participants with higher expectations tended to explain iCub’s behavior in mentalistic terms; meanwhile, participants with lower expectations maintained their mechanistic explanations of behavior. Our findings suggest that expectations about capabilities and purpose of the robot might modulate the adoption of intentional stance toward artificial agents.

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Change history

  • 21 November 2019

    Unfortunately, the authors of this article had failed to add an acknowledgement to their contribution. This missing acknowledgement was added to the article and reads as follows:

    Acknowledgement:

    This work received support from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant awarded to AW, titled “InStance: Intentional Stance for Social Attunement.” G.A. No: ERC-2016-StG-715058).

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Acknowledgement

This work received support from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant awarded to AW, titled “InStance: Intentional Stance for Social Attunement.” G.A. No: ERC-2016-StG-715058).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto Italiano di Tecnología, 16152, Genoa, Italy

    Jairo Perez-Osorio, Serena Marchesi, Davide Ghiglino & Agnieszka Wykowska

  2. Universitá di Trento, 38068, Rovereto, Italy

    Melis Ince

Authors
  1. Jairo Perez-Osorio
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  2. Serena Marchesi
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  3. Davide Ghiglino
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  4. Melis Ince
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  5. Agnieszka Wykowska
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jairo Perez-Osorio .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Robotics Lab, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Leganés, Madrid, Spain

    Miguel A. Salichs

  2. The National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Shuzhi Sam Ge

  3. Faculty of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, Noord-Brabant, The Netherlands

    Emilia Ivanova Barakova

  4. Mechanical & Industrial, Qatar University, Doha, Qatar

    John-John Cabibihan

  5. Department of Aerospace Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Alan R. Wagner

  6. Robotics Lab - Department of Systems Engineering and Automation, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Leganés, Madrid, Spain

    Álvaro Castro-González

  7. Wichita State University, Wichita, KS, USA

    Hongsheng He

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Perez-Osorio, J., Marchesi, S., Ghiglino, D., Ince, M., Wykowska, A. (2019). More Than You Expect: Priors Influence on the Adoption of Intentional Stance Toward Humanoid Robots. In: Salichs, M., et al. Social Robotics. ICSR 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11876. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35888-4_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35888-4_12

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-35887-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-35888-4

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