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.