Designing Artificial Agents as Social Companions

摘要

When we interact with others, we make inferences about their internal states (i.e., intentions, emotions) and use this information to understand and predict their behavior. Reasoning about the internal states of others is referred to as mentalizing, and presupposes that our social partners are believed to have a mind. Seeing mind in others increases trust, prosocial behaviors and feelings of social connection, and leads to improved joint performance. However, while human agents trigger mind perception by default, artificial agents are not automatically treated as intentional entities but need to be designed to do so. The panel addresses this issue by discussing how mind attribution to robots and other automated agents can be elicited by design, what the effects of mind perception are on attitudes and performance in human-robot and human-machine interaction and what behavioral and neuroscientific paradigms can be used to investigate these questions. Application areas covered include social robotics, automation, driver-vehicle interfaces, and others.