Empirical Investigations into the Believability of Robot Affect.

Abstract

The concept of “believability ” (of an agent) is difficult to pin down, making its value questionable for experimental design, quantitative empirical evaluations, and explanations of peo-ple’s perceptions of agents in general. We propose to replace “believability ” with a set of finer-grained notions based on people’s attitudes that are better suited to these uses. Based on our analysis, we demonstrate an experimental methodology to evaluate subjects ’ attitudes toward robot affective states, one which allows us to get at various aspects of believability that would be difficult to achieve with more coarse-grained notions of believability.