Effects of robotic agents' appearances on users' interpretations of the agents' attitudes: towards an expansion of "uncanny valley" assumption

Abstract

This paper describes experimental investigation how agents' appearances affect users' interpretations of agents' attitudes. Specifically, we conducted a psychological experiment that participants were presented artificial sounds as subtle expressions that can make human estimate specific agents' primitive attitudes from three kinds of different agents, e.g., Mindstonns robot, AIBO robot, and normal laptop PC, and they were asked to select the correct attitudes based on the expressed sounds from these three agents. As the result, the participants showed the higher interpretation rates when the sounds were presented from PC, while they did the lower rates from Mindstorms and AIBO robots, even though the artificial sounds expressed from these agents were the completely same sounds. Finally, the result was compared to the Mori's assumption that is about the relationship between an agents' appearance (likeness) and users' familiarity to the agents.