Högskolan i Skövde

The emerging research field of human-robot interaction (HRI) has grown increasingly popular as social robots are being introduced to the general public with applications such as elderly care, companionship, or therapy. With researchers with multidisciplinary backgrounds from e.g. psychology, cognitive science, computer science, how HRI is chosen to be framed is still discussed. My research aims to gain a deeper knowledge of how humans interpret and understand social robots. When interacting with social robots, humans tend to prescribe more intelligence than what the robot is actually capable of. Due to this expectation from the humans, one may fill in a gap between what humans prescribe in social robots and what they actually can do. People’s expectations of robots and other agents has been previously addressed in different ways, e.g. in research on anthropomorphism, intentional stance, and autonomy. My aim is to address this in social robots and look at the different levels when this occurs. My first approach involves how humans respond to robots on a low level cognitive function, namely anticipatory gaze. Previous research has shown that humans have anticipatory gaze when observing another human move objects with their hands. This ties into the direct-matching hypothesis: human’s understand another human’s action by mapping it to their own motor representation of that action. Preliminary research has shown that this is also possible if the hand performing the action is a social robot. Although the social robot has no agency, humans tend to fill in this intelligence in the robot and thus eliciting anticipatory gaze. Another more explicit way of deepening the knowledge of this topic, is how human’s describe and react to an interaction with social robots. Because social robots are such a new artefact, most humans are not used to interacting with them and yet they tend to have preconceived notions of what they are capable of. I ask, how are humans actually interacting with robots and how are they influenced by these preconceived notions? Furthermore, what responsibility to we have a researchers towards participants when exposing them to social robots? Are we deceiving participants when we are not transparent with what the robot is actually capable of? There is a need to understand this further in HRI in order to continue with the important research that is being done in this field.