Figure 1 - uploaded by Stephen J. Cowley
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The book shelves of Trinity College Library, Dublin, with obvious signs of an alphabetic classification system.
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Like computers before them, social robots can be used as a fundamental research tool. Indeed, they can help us to turn our attention from putative inner modules to thinking about the flow and emergence of human intellectual powers. In so doing, much can be gained from seeking solutions to MacDorman's person problem: how can human bodies - and perha...
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Context 1
... classifications or catalogues are visibly evident in the physical library shelves at Trinity College library, Dublin (See figure 1) where the letters of the alphabet can be seen on each shelf level. This simple alphabetic catalogue system represents just one type of cataloguing prior to the introduction of the Dewey Decimal System. ...
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Anthropomorphism is the tendency to attribute human characteristics to non–human entities. This paper presents exploratory work to evaluate how human responses during the ultimatum game vary according to the level of anthropomorphism of the opponent, which was either a human, a humanoid robot or a computer. Results from an online user study (N=138)...
Citations
... As a proof that, even in simple environments, embodied and embedded interaction can bring about coordination and/or synchronisation (Cowley, 2008; McGann and De Jaegher, 2009; Niewiadomski et al., 2010; Prepin and Pelachaud, 2011a,b) ...
Researchers in social cognition increasingly realize that many phenomena cannot be understood by investigating offline situations only, focusing on individual mechanisms and an observer perspective. There are processes of dynamic emergence specific to online situations, when two or more persons are engaged in a real-time interaction that are more than just the sum of the individual capacities or behaviors, and these require the study of online social interaction. Auvray et al.'s (2009) perceptual crossing paradigm offers possibly the simplest paradigm for studying such online interactions: two persons, a one-dimensional space, one bit of information, and a yes/no answer. This study has provoked a lot of resonance in different areas of research, including experimental psychology, computer/robot modeling, philosophy, psychopathology, and even in the field of design. In this article, we review and critically assess this body of literature. We give an overview of both behavioral experimental research and simulated agent modeling done using the perceptual crossing paradigm. We discuss different contexts in which work on perceptual crossing has been cited. This includes the controversy about the possible constitutive role of perceptual crossing for social cognition. We conclude with an outlook on future research possibilities, in particular those that could elucidate the link between online interaction dynamics and individual social cognition.
... In the case of a salient object on 'offer' and a task-naive group, the lack of established social norms and ambiguity of the situation facilitates deindividuation within the group (Cowley, 2008 andGuerin, 2003). Furthermore, as robots are typically perceived as machines and not conscious beings this deindividuation will be exacerbated through an increased sense of anonymity (Postmes & Spears, 1998) and the group is unlikely to feel subject to social influence or identification (Kiesler, Siegel, & McGuire, 1984). ...
The industrial revolution undoubtedly defined the role of machines in our society, and it directly shaped the paradigm for human machine interaction - a paradigm which was inherited by the field of Human Robot Interaction (HRI) as the machines became robots. This paper argues that, for a foreseeable set of interactions, reshaping this paradigm would result in more effective and more often successful interactions. This paper presents our Robot Centric paradigm for HRI. Evidence in the form of summaries of relevant literature and our past efforts in developing social-robotics enabling technology is presented to support our paradigm. A definition and a set of recommendations for designing the key enabling component, sociocontextual cues, of our paradigm are presented. Finally, empirical evidence generated through a number of experiments and field studies (N = 456 and N = 320) demonstrates our paradigm is both feasibly incorporated into HRI and moreover, yields significant contributions to the successfulness of a set of HRIs.
Der Beitrag will angesichts neuer Fragestellungen im Verhältnis zwischen Mensch und Maschine am Beispiel eines Kommunikationsexperimentes mit einem humanoiden Roboter herausarbeiten, welche Facetten von Sozialität einerseits von den menschlichen Kommunikationspartnern an den Roboter herangetragen werden, aber auch, zu welchen Akkommodations- und Adaptionsleistungen Menschen bereit sind, um mit dem Roboter in eine soziale Interaktion zu treten. An den nachstehenden Analysen zur sprachlichen und gestischen Interaktion von Menschen mit einem humanoiden Kleinroboter (NAO) wird der Frage nachgegangen, wie sich kooperative Prozesse zwischen Mensch und Roboter gestalten.
Social robotics is a rapidly developing industry-oriented area of research, intent on making robots in social roles commonplace in the near future. This has led to rising interest in the dynamics as well as ethics of human-robot relationships, described here as a nascent relational turn. A contrast is drawn with the 1990s’ paradigm shift associated with relational-self themes in social psychology. Constructions of the human-robot relationship reproduce the “I-You-Me” dominant model of theorising about the self with biases that (as in social constructionism) consistently accentuate externalist or “interactionist” standpoints as opposed to internalist or “individualistic”. Perspectives classifiable as “ecological relationalism” may compensate for limitations of interactionist-individualistic dimension. Implications for theorising subjectivity are considered.
Ensuring that a particular and unsuspecting member of a group is the recipient of a salient-item hand-over is a complicated interaction. The robot must effectively, expediently and reliably communicate its intentions to advert any tendency within the group towards antinormative behaviour. In this paper, we study how a robot can establish the participant roles of such an interaction using imitated social and contextual cues. We designed two gaze cues, the first was designed to discourage antinormative behaviour through individualising a particular member of the group and the other to the contrary. We designed and conducted a field experiment (456 participants in 64 trials) in which small groups of people (between 3 and 20 people) assembled in front of the robot, which then attempted to pass a salient object to a particular group member by presenting a physical cue, followed by one of two variations of a gaze cue. Our results showed that presenting the individualising cue had a significant (z=3.733, p=0.0002) effect on the robot's ability to ensure that an arbitrary group member did not take the salient object and that the selected participant did.
