Stop Motion Animation - While(Alive){} (2021)

While(Alive){} (2021) is a stop-motion animation film investigating the evolving relationship between a human and a humanoid robot over the lifespan. It was created with stop-motion animation and 3D printing to explore the tension between the biological and the non-biological.

Behind The Scenes

Shot and cut by Jordan Paolillo

Rats in Lab Coats

Rats in Lab Coats is a production company founded by Ziggy O’Reilly and Cody Cameron-Brown. They are passionate about exploring the intersection between art and science through animation.

Showcases

• Fringe Festival, Perth, Australia

• Revelation Film Festival, Perth, Australia

• CyBorg Film Festival, Perugia, Italy

Nominated for Animation Award, Western Australian Screen Awards

The Adoption of the Intentional Stance - While(Alive){} (2021)

We adopted this film as stimuli in an behaviorual experiment to investigatie (1) whether a it modulates participants’ tendency to adopt the intentional stance toward a humanoid robot and (2) 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.

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.

Publications

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

Cameron-Brown, C., & O’Reilly, Z. (2021). Written contribution. In A. F. Peirce (Ed.), The Australian Film Yearbook. The Curb.

Funding & 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 funded by the ERC grant “ InStance: Intentional Stance for social attunement", awarded to Agnieszka Wykowska.