What is key to working harmoniously with robots?
When we perform actions with other humans, we experience a sense of joint agency, a feeling of ‘We did that together’, rather than ‘I did that’ or ‘You did that’. But do we get the same feeling when working with robots? According to researchers supported by the EU-funded InStance and TeAMH-Robot projects, it can happen, but on one condition. For a human to experience a sense of joint agency with a robot, the robot must behave in a human-like, social manner. The study helps deepen our understanding of the optimal circumstances needed for humans and robots to work together in the same environment. The research was conducted by scientists from the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genova who sought to find out when and under what conditions people treat robots as intentional agents. Using behavioural measures and neural responses measured by electroencephalography, they investigated whether the sense of joint agency experienced by a human is influenced by what he or she perceives as intentionality in the robot. Their findings are described in a paper published in the journal ‘Science Robotics’. “As humans, we do not act in a social vacuum and most of our actions require coordination with others in space and time to achieve a goal,” observes study senior author Prof. Agnieszka Wykowska in a news release posted on ‘EurekAlert!’. The IIT researcher goes on to explain how the experience of joint agency is a crucial aspect of our interaction with others. “In our research study we discovered that humans experience this sense of joint agency with the robot partner when it was presented as an intentional agent, but not when it was presented as a mechanical artefact.”
The experiments
The sense of joint agency – the feeling of shared control we experience when we collaborate to complete tasks – is the basis of team building. The research team first identified its mechanisms in human-human interaction and then compared responses with human-robot interaction. The interaction involved moving an onscreen cursor to a target location and then confirming the position of the cursor on the target, which triggered a tone. To assess human perception of the robot during the interaction, the researchers manipulated the human likeness of the robot, called iCub, in two experiments. In the first, iCub was made to perform a task mechanically, resulting in it being viewed as a mechanical artefact by participants. In the second, aiming to make participants perceive iCub as more intentional and human-like, the researchers had them first interact with iCub in a way that would increase the likelihood of attributing intentionality to it. The interaction therefore involved a dialogue, exchanging gazes and watching videos together, during which iCub showed human-like emotional responses. Based on their behavioural and neural responses, only in the second experiment did humans feel a sense of joint agency with the humanoid robot. The results of the study supported by InStance (Intentional stance for social attunement) and TeAMH-Robot (Temporal Adaptation and anticipation Mechanisms in Human-Robot interaction) suggest that proper teamwork between humans and robots is more likely to happen when the robot is viewed as an intentional and social agent, rather than as a mechanical device. For more information, please see: InStance project website TeAMH-Robot project
Keywords
InStance, TeAMH-Robot, robot, humanoid, humanoid robot, joint agency, intentionality, iCub