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To get a better understanding of people's natural responses to humanlike robots outside the lab, we analyzed commentary on online videos depicting robots of different humanlikeness and gender. We built on previous work, which compared online video commentary of moderately and highly humanlike robots with respect to valence, uncanny valley, threats, and objectification. Additionally, we took into account the robot's gender, its appearance, its societal impact, the attribution of mental states, and how people attribute human stereotypes to robots. The results are mostly in line with previous work. Overall, the findings indicate that moderately humanlike robot design may be preferable over highly humanlike robot design because it is less associated with negative attitudes and perceptions. Robot designers should therefore be cautious when designing highly humanlike and gendered robots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For social robots to be successful, they need to be accepted by humans. Human-robot interaction (HRI) researchers are aware of the need to develop the right kinds of robots with appropriate, natural ways for them to interact with humans. However, much of human perception and cognition occurs outside of conscious awareness, and how robotic agents engage these processes is currently unknown. Here, we explored automatic, reflexive social attention, which operates outside of conscious control within a fraction of a second to discover whether and how these processes generalize to agents with varying humanlikeness in their form and motion. Using a social variant of a well-established spatial attention paradigm, we tested whether robotic or human appearance and/or motion influenced an agent's ability to capture or direct implicit social attention. In each trial, either images or videos of agents looking to one side of space (a head turn) were presented to human observers. We measured reaction time to a peripheral target as an index of attentional capture and direction. We found that all agents, regardless of humanlike form or motion, were able to direct spatial attention in the cued direction. However, differences in the form of the agent affected attentional capture, i.e., how quickly the observers could disengage attention from the agent and respond to the target. This effect further interacted with whether the spatial cue (head turn) was presented through static images or videos. Overall whereas reflexive social attention operated in the same manner for human and robot social agents for spatial attentional cueing, robotic appearance, as well as whether the agent was static or moving significantly influenced unconscious attentional capture processes. These studies reveal how unconscious social attentional processes operate when the agent is a human vs. a robot, add novel manipulations to the literature such as the role of visual motion, and provide a link between attention studies in HRI, and decades of research on unconscious social attention in experimental psychology and vision science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human communication involves a number of nonverbal cues that are seemingly unintentional, unconscious, and automatic-both in their production and perception-and convey rich information on the emotional state and intentions of an individual. One family of such cues is called "nonverbal leakage." In this paper, we explore whether people can read nonverbal leakage cues-particularly gaze cues-in humanlike robots and make inferences on robots' intentions, and whether the physical design of the robot affects these inferences. We designed a gaze cue for Geminoid-a highly humanlike android-and Robovie-a robot with stylized, abstract humanlike features-that allowed the robots to "leak" information on what they might have in mind. In a controlled laboratory experiment, we asked participants to play a game of guessing with either of the robots and evaluated how the gaze cue affected participants' task performance. We found that the gaze cue did, in fact, lead to better performance, from which we infer that the cue led to attributions of mental states and intentionality. Our results have implications for robot design, particularly for designing expression of intentionality, and for our understanding of how people respond to human social cues when they are enacted by robots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Testing the assumption that more anthropomorphism in computer representations cues more social responses from users, a between-participants experiment (N=168) manipulated 12 computer agents to represent four levels of anthropomorphism: low, moderate, high and real humans. These 12 characters were selected through pretesting the humanlikeness level and controlling attractiveness rating. A control condition without an image was included. Social responses were assessed with the participants' ratings of social presence and homophily with the agents and social influence of the agents in social choice-dilemma scenarios. Linear polynomial analysis revealed significant linear trend for all measures, supporting the hypothesis. As the agent became more anthropomorphic to being human, it was rated with higher social presence and higher homophily and was more persuasive in social influence. The control condition without an image showed responses most similar to those in the human image condition, suggesting the notion of the default image in interactive text-based computer interfaces. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]