How do robotic agents' appearances affect people's interpretations of the agents' attitudes?

Abstract

An experimental investigation of how the appearance of robotic agents affects interpretations people make of the agents.' attitudes is described. We conducted a psychological experiment where participants were presented artificial sounds that can make people estimate specific agents' primitive attitudes from three kinds of agents, e.g., a Mindstorms robot, AIBO robot, and normal laptop PC. They were also asked to select the correct attitudes based on the sounds expressed by these three agents. The results showed that the participants had higher interpretation rates when a PC presented the sounds, while they had lower rates when Mindstorms and AIBO robots presented the sounds, even though the artificial sounds expressed by these agents were completely the same.