Mind Perception in a Competitive Human-Robot Interaction Game

Abstract

Robotic agents are becoming increasingly pervasive in society, and have already begun advancing fields such as healthcare, education, and industry. However, despite their potential to do good for society, many people still feel unease when imaging a future where robots and humans work and live together in shared environments, partly because robots are not generally trusted or ascribed human-like socio-emotional skills such as mentalizing and empathizing. In addition, performing tasks conjointly with robots can be frustrating and ineffective partially due to the fact that neuronal networks involved in action understanding and execution (i.e., the action-perception network; APN) are underactivated in human-robot interaction (HRI). While a number of studies has linked underactivation in APN to reduced abilities to predict a robot’s actions, little is known about how performing a competitive task together with a robot affects one’s own ability to execute or suppress an action. In the current experiment, we use a Go/No-Go task that requires participants to give a response on Go trials and suppress a response on No-Go trials to examine whether the performance of human players is impacted by whether they play the game against a robot believed to be controlled by a human as opposed to being pre-programmed. Preliminary data shows higher false alarm rates on No-Go trials, higher hit rates on Go trials, longer reaction times on Go trials and higher inverse efficiency scores in the human-controlled versus the pre-programmed condition. The results show that mind perception (here: perceiving actions as human-controlled) significantly impacted action execution of human players in a competitive human-robot interaction game.