Social Cognition in Human-Robot Interaction, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT).
Department of Psychology, University of Turin.
Cogn Sci. 2023 Dec;47(12):e13393. doi: 10.1111/cogs.13393.
In our daily lives, we are continually involved in decision-making situations, many of which take place in the context of social interaction. Despite the ubiquity of such situations, there remains a gap in our understanding of how decision-making unfolds in social contexts, and how communicative signals, such as social cues and feedback, impact the choices we make. Interestingly, there is a new social context to which humans are recently increasingly more frequently exposed-social interaction with not only other humans but also artificial agents, such as robots or avatars. Given these new technological developments, it is of great interest to address the question of whether-and in what way-social signals exhibited by non-human agents influence decision-making. The present study aimed to examine whether robot non-verbal communicative behavior has an effect on human decision-making. To this end, we implemented a two-alternative-choice task where participants were to guess which of two presented cups was covering a ball. This game was an adaptation of a "Shell Game." A robot avatar acted as a game partner producing social cues and feedback. We manipulated robot's cues (pointing toward one of the cups) before the participant's decision and the robot's feedback ("thumb up" or no feedback) after the decision. We found that participants were slower (compared to other conditions) when cues were mostly invalid and the robot reacted positively to wins. We argue that this was due to the incongruence of the signals (cue vs. feedback), and thus violation of expectations. In sum, our findings show that incongruence in pre- and post-decision social signals from a robot significantly influences task performance, highlighting the importance of understanding expectations toward social robots for effective human-robot interactions.
在日常生活中，我们不断地参与决策情境，其中许多情境发生在社会互动的背景下。尽管这种情境普遍存在，但我们对决策如何在社会情境中展开，以及沟通信号（如社交暗示和反馈）如何影响我们的选择，仍然存在理解上的差距。有趣的是，人类最近越来越频繁地面临一种新的社交情境——不仅与人类，而且还与机器人或化身等人工代理进行社交互动。鉴于这些新的技术发展，研究非人类代理所展示的社交信号是否以及以何种方式影响决策，这是非常有趣的。本研究旨在探讨机器人非语言交际行为是否会影响人类的决策。为此，我们实施了一项二择一任务，让参与者猜测两个展示杯中的哪一个下面藏着一个球。这个游戏是“贝壳游戏”的改编版。一个机器人化身作为游戏伙伴，发出社交暗示和反馈。在参与者做出决定之前，我们操纵机器人的暗示（指向其中一个杯子），在参与者做出决定之后，机器人会反馈“竖起大拇指”或没有反馈。我们发现，当暗示大多无效且机器人对胜利做出积极反应时，参与者的反应速度会变慢（与其他条件相比）。我们认为这是由于信号的不一致（暗示与反馈），从而违反了预期。总之，我们的研究结果表明，机器人在决策前后的社交信号不一致会显著影响任务表现，突出了理解对社交机器人的期望对于有效人机交互的重要性。
