Beyond human-likeness: Socialness is more influential when attributing mental states to robots
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In: iScience, Vol. 27, No. 6, 110070, 21.06.2024.
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Beyond human-likeness: Socialness is more influential when attributing mental states to robots
AU - Jastrzab Binney, Laura
AU - Chaudhury, Bishakha
AU - Ashley, Sarah
AU - Koldewyn, Kami
AU - Cross, Emily
N1 - © 2024 The Author(s).
PY - 2024/6/21
Y1 - 2024/6/21
N2 - We sought to replicate and expand previous work showing that the more human-like a robot appears, the more willing people are to attribute mind-like capabilities and socially engage with it. Forty-two participants played games against a human, a humanoid robot, a mechanoid robot, and a computer algorithm while undergoing functional neuroimaging. We confirmed that the more human-like the agent, the more participants attributed a mind to them. However, exploratory analyses revealed that the perceived socialness of an agent appeared to be as, if not more, important for mind attribution. Our findings suggest top-down knowledge cues may be equally or possibly more influential than bottom-up stimulus cues when exploring mind attribution in non-human agents. While further work is now required to test this hypothesis directly, these preliminary findings hold important implications for robotic design and to understand and test the flexibility of human social cognition when people engage with artificial agents
AB - We sought to replicate and expand previous work showing that the more human-like a robot appears, the more willing people are to attribute mind-like capabilities and socially engage with it. Forty-two participants played games against a human, a humanoid robot, a mechanoid robot, and a computer algorithm while undergoing functional neuroimaging. We confirmed that the more human-like the agent, the more participants attributed a mind to them. However, exploratory analyses revealed that the perceived socialness of an agent appeared to be as, if not more, important for mind attribution. Our findings suggest top-down knowledge cues may be equally or possibly more influential than bottom-up stimulus cues when exploring mind attribution in non-human agents. While further work is now required to test this hypothesis directly, these preliminary findings hold important implications for robotic design and to understand and test the flexibility of human social cognition when people engage with artificial agents
KW - social neuroscience
KW - social robotics
KW - second-person neuroscience
KW - social cognition
KW - Mentalizing
U2 - 10.1016/j.isci.2024.110070
DO - 10.1016/j.isci.2024.110070
M3 - Article
C2 - 38947497
VL - 27
JO - iScience
JF - iScience
SN - 2589-0042
IS - 6
M1 - 110070
ER -