Modulating the Intentional Stance: Humanoid Robots, Narrative & Autistic Traits (2021)

To enhance collaboration between humans and robots it might be important to trigger towards humanoid robots, similar social cognitive mechanisms that are triggered towards humans, such as the adoption of the intentional stance (i.e., explaining an agents behavior with reference to mental states).

Aims

  1. Measure whether a film modulates participants’ tendency to adopt the intentional stance toward a humanoid robot

  2. Investigate whether autistic traits affects this adoption

We administered two subscales of the InStance Test (IST) (i.e. ‘isolated robot’ subscale and ‘social robot’ subscale) before and after participants watched a film depicting an interaction between a humanoid robot and a human.

Fig. 1. Key frames from the stop-motion animated film While(Alive){}. © Cody Cameron-Brown and Ziggy O’Reilly.

Results

On the isolated robot subscale, individuals with low autistic traits were more likely to adopt the intentional stance towards a humanoid robot after they watched the film, but there was no effect on individuals with high autistic traits. On the social robot subscale (i.e. when the robot is interacting with a human) both individuals with low and high autistic traits decreased in their adoption of the intentional stance after they watched the film. This suggests that the content of the narrative and an individual’s social cognitive abilities, affects the degree to which the intentional stance towards a humanoid robot is adopted.

Fig. 2. (a) Interaction effect across subscales before and after watching While(Alive){} for the low AQ group. (b) Interaction effect across subscales before and after watching While(Alive){} for the high AQ group.

Publication

O’Reilly, Z., Ghiglino, D., Spatola, N., & Wykowska, A. (2021, November). Modulating the Intentional Stance: Humanoid Robots, Narrative and Autistic Traits. In International Conference on Social Robotics (pp. 697-706). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90525-5_61

Acknowledgements

This study was conducted at the Social Cognition for Human-Robot Interaction Line at the Italian Institute of Technology, Italy. The S4HRI research line is closely related to the ERC grant “ InStance: Intentional Stance for social attunement", awarded to Agnieszka Wykowska.