When Humanoid Robots Become Human-Like Interaction Partners: Corepresentation of Robotic Actions

Abstract

In human-human interactions co-representing a partner’s actions is crucial to successfully adjust and coordinate actions with others. Current research suggests that action co-representation is restricted to interactions between human agents facilitating social interaction with conspecifics. In the present study, we investigated whether action co-representation, as measured by the Social Simon Effect (SSE), is present when we share a task with a real humanoid robot. Further, we tested if the believed humanness of the robot’s functional principle modulates the extent to which robotic actions are co-represented. We described the robot to participants either as functioning in a biologically inspired human-like way or in a purely deterministic machine-like manner. The SSE was present in the human-like, but not in the machinelike robot condition. The present findings suggest that humans co-represent the actions of non-biological robotic agents when they start to attribute human-like cognitive processes to the robot. Our findings provide novel evidence for top-down modulation effects on action co-representation in human-robot interaction situations. Words: 161