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16:30 - 18:00
Parallel sessions 3
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16:30 - 18:00
Room: HSZ - N2
Chair/s:
Jan Pohl
With the rapid advancement in artificial intelligence technologies and increased media coverage of robots, humans are becoming more aware of artificial agents, some even testing them by interacting with online agents like chatbots. This exposure provides a unique opportunity to study how humans generalize social perception beyond biological agents, offering insights into the flexibility and boundaries of social cognition.
Understanding how people perceive and interact with these agents is central not only to the design of effective human-robot collaboration but also to uncovering fundamental aspects of social cognition. When and why do people attribute sociality, intentionality, or even moral capacities to machines? And how do seemingly simple cues in robot behavior shape complex human perceptions?
This symposium brings together five empirical contributions investigating the psychological mechanisms underlying complex attributions toward robots in diverse interaction contexts. It explores how perceptions of a robot’s social nature influence cooperative engagement and trust, how subtle behavioral or paralinguistic cues shape impressions of humanness and identity, and how movement patterns guide inferences about underlying intentions or mental capabilities.
Taken together, these investigations reveal how both low-level perceptual cues and higher-order cognitive evaluations jointly shape human responses in collaborative and observational contexts, offering new insights into how social cognition operates at the boundary between human and artificial agents.
The series of talks aims to foster interdisciplinary discussion among experimental psychologists, cognitive scientists, and roboticists, offering new insights into how humans make sense of increasingly social machines and what this reveals about the architecture of human social cognition.
Submission 360
Collaboration in Human-Robot Interaction Depends on Mind Perception
SymposiumTalk-01
Presented by: Eva Wiese
Eva Wiese 1, 3, Jairo Perez-Osorio 1, Patrick Weis 2, 3
1 Technical University of Berlin, Germany
2 University of Würzburg, Germany
3 George Mason University, United States
Robots are increasingly available for workplace collaboration, which raises the question of which tasks people are willing to assign to robots and how strongly this is influenced by their perceived mental capacities. Based on the two-dimensional model of mind perception, we investigated in several experiments how humans assign tasks to robots as a function of their perceived agency (i.e., ability to plan and act) and experience (i.e., ability to sense and feel). Participants performed an analytical task (i.e., calculating differences) and a social task (i.e., judging emotions) and were allowed to offload the task to a robot at any time. Based on previous work on agent-task fit, we expected participants to offload the analytical task more often to robots than the social task, as robots are perceived as higher in agency than experience. For robots with varying levels of the experience factor, we expected participants to offload the social task more often and the analytical task less often to a robot described as emotionally capable (i.e., experience high) versus incapable (i.e., experience low). In line with our hypotheses, participants collaborated significantly more with robots for the analytical than the social task, and collaborated more with the emotionally capable robot for the social task and the emotionally incapable robot for the analytical task. This effect is in line with the “specificity of mind” hypothesis and was prevalent despite the fact that both robots were equally proficient with both tasks—a fact participants were informed about at the beginning of the experiment.