Anthropocentric Attribution Bias in Human Prediction of Robot Behavior

Abstract

In many types of human-robot interactions, people must track the beliefs of robots based on uncertain estimates of robots' perceptual and cognitive capabilities. Did the robot see what happened and did it understand what it saw? In this paper, we present preliminary experimental evidence that people estimating what a humanoid robot knows or believes about the environment anthropocentrically assume it to have human-like perceptual and cognitive capabilities. However, our results also suggest that people are able to adjust their incorrect assumptions based on observations of the robot.