Autumn Edwards

Western Michigan University | WMU · School of Communication

DOMIN.: …You see with the help of his tinctures he could make whatever he wanted. He could have produced a Medusa with the brain of Socrates or a worm fifty yards long-(She laughs. He does also; leans closer on couch, then straightens up again)-but being without a grain of humor, he took into his head to make a vertebrate or perhaps a man. (Čapek,...

The widespread use of Voice-Based Assistants (VBAs) in various applications has introduced a new dimension to human-machine communication. This study explores how users assess VBAs exhibiting either excessive or insufficient communication accommodation in imagined initial interactions. Drawing on Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) and the Ste...

Abstract: In this chapter, we examine the technologies that have penetrated homes to address housework and consider how these have affected the gender division of labor in the domestic sphere. While men’s involvement in housework remains low relative to women globally, there has been a notable rise in their engagement in childcare over recent yea...

Background Education is often the primary arena for exploring and integrating new technologies. AI and human‐machine communication (HMC) are prevalent in the classroom, yet we are still learning how student perceptions of these tools will impact education. Objectives We sought to understand student perceptions of credibility related to written fee...

This study examines the role of voice-based assistants (VBAs), specifically Alexa, in the mediatization paradigm framework. The authors hypothesize that emerging technologies such as chatbots and VBAs intensify the process of online meta-reintermediation of news. Three research questions were investigated through a questionnaire administered to 655...

El propósito de este artículo es situar el análisis de la relación entre mujeres y comunicación digital en un plano histórico, desarrollarla en perspectiva comparada con otras formas de comunicación y, por último, integrarla en una dimensión política, teniendo en cuenta los tres elementos que queremos analizar: género, comunicación y tecnología. Nu...

What happens when a social robot attempts to accommodate its communicative behavior towards the human interlocutor? The present experiment seeks to expand understanding of how people evaluate social robots when they (the social robots) engage in cases of over-and under-accommodation during interactions. Additionally, the current study partially rep...

open access available: http://bitly.ws/LAQ9 This introduction to the volume discusses the evolving field of Human-Machine Communication (HMC), drawing on insights from the philosophy of science. We explore critical debates in the field, underscoring the importance of challenging assumptions, embracing interfield work, and fostering dialogue in sha...

Introduction Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) is both the name of an academic research field and a general context of interaction between humans and robotic systems. Some research conducted within the field of HRI pertains to communication and a great deal is indirectly relevant by shedding light on perception, cognition, and behavior. Moreover, numer...

Doctoral Dissertation 2023: Support in the context of human-machine communication (SHMC) is the human use of machine agents in largely informal ways to intentionally seek or receive resources to buffer stress. However, researchers traditionally consider supportive communication as an interpersonal exchange between humans. In contrast, some recent r...

Mute machines offer clues to understanding social dynamics simply by their function and proximity to humans. We used followbots, robots that haul equipment without social interaction, to investigate perceptions of leader configuration on credibility, attraction, and social presence across three scenarios (leader, leader/followbot, leader/human). Th...

Mainly, the scholarly debate on Alexa has focused on sexist/anti-woman gender representations in the everyday life of many families, on a cluster of themes such as privacy, insecurity, and trust, and on the world of education and health. This paper takes another stance and explores via online survey methodology how university student respondents in...

In this introduction to the fifth volume of the journal Human-Machine Communication, we present and discuss the five articles focusing on gender and human-machine communication. In this essay, we will analyze the theme of gender, including how this notion has historically and politically been set up, and for what reasons. We will start by consideri...

Human-Machine Communication refers to the collaborative process in which humans and machines use messages to create and participate in social reality. Among the most important aspects of social reality are personal relationships, which are accomplished through communication and social interaction with others. As communication between humans and art...

The gendering of machine agents risks further complicating the social framework in ways that reverberate to humans' relationships and identities. This paper explores how users perceive the gender and status of Amazon's Alexa. We argue that voice-based assistants, particularly those with feminine names and voices, may contribute to reinforcing a ret...

In this introduction to the fourth volume of the journal Human-Machine Communication, we present and discuss the nine articles selected for inclusion. In this essay, we aim to frame some crucial psychological, sociological, and cultural aspects of this field of research. In particular, we situate the current scholarship from a historical perspectiv...

Social distancing policies such as limits on public gatherings and contact with others were utilized around the world to slow the spread of COVID-19. Yet, decreased social interactions may also threaten people’s well-being. In this project, we sought to understand novelty-relevant experiences surrounding in-home companion robot pets for adults that...

Increasingly, people interact with embodied machine communicators and are challenged to understand their natures and behaviors. The Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE, sometimes referred to as the correspondence bias) is the tendency for individuals to overemphasize personality-based or dispositional explanations for other people's behavior while u...

The current study examines qualitative responses from participants about their opinions on a weather forecast delivered by a professional meteorologist, an amateur meteorologist, and a social robot standing in for a meteorologist. Through thematic analyses, this study identified that people evaluated each weather forecast agent’s performance based...

In this study, we investigated the differences in perceived competence , credibility, and social presence within socially supportive interactions (emotional or instrumental) using human, AI, and social robot actors. We further differentiated our findings by actor and type of support and found that participants thought the human and social robot dif...

[For open access to full text: www.hmcjournal.com] In this essay, we introduce the 10 articles comprising Volume 2 (2021) of Human-Machine Communication, each of which is innovative and offers a substantial contribution to the field of human-machine communication (HMC). As a collection, these articles move forward the HMC project by touching on f...

Teaching is inherently collaborative. The input teachers receive from colleagues, students, and administrators can influence curriculum choices and alter classroom dynamics. A teaching team is a group of professionals who choose to actively collaborate for a common instructional purpose (Cook & Friend, 1995). The model of shared teaching responsibi...

Weather-related communication lends itself well to various styles of delivery and medium. Yet, new communication technologies have changed information consumption in this domain and created changes for broadcast media. Some new media platforms allow the participation of nonprofessional (amateur) agents, whereas others, such as social robotics or ch...

Cues delivered by agents are known to trigger mental shortcuts associated with ontological category or the kind of thing an agent is. Two such heuristics are key to considering organic and machine agents, and result in biased evaluations: the machine heuristic (MH) (if machine, then systematic/unbiased, therefore its products are good) and the natu...

The Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE) is the tendency for people to over-emphasize dispositional or personality-based explanations for others’ behavior while under-emphasizing situational explanations. Compared to people, current robots are less agentic and autonomous and more driven by programming, design, and humans-in-the-loop. People do nonet...

Cues delivered by agents are known to trigger mental shortcuts associated with ontological category, or the kind of thing an agent is. Two such heuristics are key to considering organic and machine agents and result in biased evaluations: the machine heuristic (technology is systematic/unbiased therefore its products are good) and the nature heuris...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to interrogate the relationship between self-reported levels of acute stress, perceived social support and interactions with robot animals in an academic library. The authors hypothesized that (1) participants would report lower stress and higher positive affect after their interaction with a robot support anima...

The purpose of this paper is to interrogate the relationship between self-reported levels of acute stress, perceived social support, and interactions with robot animals in an academic library. The authors hypothesized: 1. participants would report lower stress and higher positive affect after their interaction with a robot support animal; 2. percei...

Extending previous research on the Computers Are Social Actors paradigm and the human-to-human interaction script, this study examines the interpersonal impressions of a social robot evaluator versus a human evaluator in a performance evaluation context. A between-subjects experiment was conducted to measure participants’ impressions of the credibi...

When social robots are used in communicative contexts, the norms, values, and expectations associated with the process of communication itself are important considerations. Message design logics (MDL) are working models of communication that lead to distinct ways of thinking about communication situations and reasoning from goals to messages. The t...

As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies become more common and capable interaction partners (human-machine communication; HMC), understanding how people perceive and interact with them becomes increasingly important to study. This essay argues that one important avenue for this study is the application of relevant interpersonal and computer-me...

https://ijtelepresence.org/1-2/

Artificially intelligent (AI) agents increasingly occupy roles once served by humans in computer-mediated communication (CMC). Technological affordances like emoji give interactants (humans or bots) the ability to partially overcome the limited nonverbal information in CMC. However, despite the growth of chatbots as conversational partners, few CMC...

[For open access to full text: www.hmcjournal.com] ------ This journal offers a space dedicated to theorizing, researching empirically, and discussing human-machine communication (HMC), a new form of communication with digital interlocutors that has recently developed and has imposed the urgency to be analyzed and understood. There is the need to...

This study examines how players describe their rationale behind decisions made during gameplay of Detroit: Become Human and how responses may coincide with character attachment (CA). Semi-structured interviews were conducted to examine the presence of character attachment and how it may lead to the player's understanding of their gameplay choices....

Featuring diverse chapters written by thirty principal scholars in the discipline, Communication Is…Perspectives on Theory is an innovative and evocative collection that examines what communication theory is and how it functions. Throughout the text, each scholar offers unique and insightful perspective, exposing readers to the myriad ways in which...

From keeping robots as in-home helpers to banning their presence or functions, a person's willingness to engage in variably intimate interactions are signals of social distance: the degree of felt understanding of and intimacy with an individual or group that characterizes pre-social and social connections. To date, social distance has been examine...

Although both HRI and Communication Science often trace their origins to the transdisciplinary cybernetics of the 20th century, they have since developed in relative isolation, with scant scholarly exchange concerning the similarities and differences in their assumptions, insights, and approaches. The purpose of this half-day workshop is to explore...

The purpose of this study was to test the strength of the machine heuristic; specifically when suspicion is primed in a message receiver concerning the veracity of information from a robot delivering news. Results demonstrate that low suspicion led to higher credibility evaluations, which consequently increased behavioral intentions. Findings are d...

This study examines the pratfall effect and interpersonal impressions of how humans perceive robots that appear forgetful and apologetic regarding information given to them by a human. Results demonstrated that the non-forgetful robot was perceived higher for interpersonal impressions when compared to the forgetful and forgetful apologizing robots.

This experiment was conducted to determine inter-personal impressions of two types of compliance-gaining strategies (warning and obligation) used to ask for the consideration of robot rights. Findings demonstrated that the strategy of obligation produced higher levels of petitioner perceived caring (a factor of source credibility) and higher percep...

This chapter outlines research in human-machine interaction and explains potentials for abuse, misuse, and anti-social behaviors towards and from machines. We focus on social bots—algorithms or artificial intelligence (AI) designed to act in ways that are similar to humans in social spaces online, and social robots—embodied social agents with anthr...

This chapter considers common perceptions about the fundamental natures of animals, humans, and machines by exploring individuals’ perceptions of the similarities and differences among those groups of agents. Specifically, this chapter focuses on understanding how a cross-section of U.S. American adults used ontological classification to understand...

When faced with the prospect of being judged on public speaking by either a human or a robot, which is the more desirable partner? Robots could serve as a potential useful partner in practicing public speeches. This chapter reports the results of an experiment demonstrating that participants reported significantly higher levels of public speaking a...

Human–machine communication has emerged as a new relational context of education and should become a priority for instructional scholarship in the coming years. With artificial intelligence and robots offering personalized instruction, teachers’ roles may shift toward overseers who design and select machine-led instruction, monitor student progress...

Extending previous research on the human-to-human interaction script, the MAIN model, and the Computers Are Social Actors (CASA) paradigm, this study examines the influence of weather-related communication sources with varying levels of expertise and agency cues (i.e. human versus bot) on impressions of communication quality. Specifically, an exper...

This study employs the Computers are Social Actors (CASA) paradigm to extend the predictions of Social Identity Theory (SIT) to human-robot interaction (HRI) in the context of instructional communication. SIT posits that individuals gain a sense of personal worth from the groups with which they identify. Previous research has demonstrated that age...

Tips offered center on classroom discourse, curriculum choices, and potential assignments. In this article, we present tips for creating a thriving undergraduate and graduate communication research lab. Based on our experiences developing and co-directing the Communication and Social Robotics Labs (CSRLs), we offer 10 best practices for acquiring r...

Message design logics (MDLs) are working models of communication that lead to different conceptions of how to rationally construct messages, or reason from goals to messages1. The three MDLs are expressive (transmitting thoughts and feelings), conventional (following socially appropriate rules to coordinate activity), and rhetorical (using language...

This paper presents a study investigating perceptions of an agent (human, robot, or A.I. computer program) delivering a treatment plan. Results demonstrate that human, robot, and A.I. physicians were perceived to be credible and attractive. However, the human physician received higher ratings when compared to the machine agents. Results are explain...

The purpose of this study is to determine levels of support for consideration of the rights of robots and to identify predictors of support for robot rights. Findings demonstrated that negative attitudes toward robots, perceived credibility of the petitioner, and prior interaction with robots were significant predictors of individuals agreeing to s...

Education has long involved the use of machines, ranging from calculators, to computers, to multimedia presentation systems, to mobile phones. Yet, the central players in education— teachers and students—could be relied upon to take the form of old-fashioned, flesh and blood, human beings. However, educational encounters of the future (and increasi...

This paper presents a study investigating perceptions of a human versus NAO robot physician conducting a simulated medical interview with undergraduate students. Results show that both human and NAO doctor were perceived to be credible and produced positive patient affect. However, the human doctor received significantly higher ratings when compare...

Robots are becoming increasingly popular in social applications and have demonstrated effectiveness in a variety of contexts such as education, health, task management, and other complex cooperative roles. The purpose of this study was to examine human–robot interaction in a nonassistive environment: a negotiation scenario. Specifically, the author...

Twitter's design allows the implementation of automated programs that can submit tweets, interact with others, and generate content based on algorithms. Scholars and end-users alike refer to these programs to as “Twitterbots.” This two-part study explores the differences in perceptions of communication quality between a human agent and a Twitterbot...

As social robotics becomes more utilized and routine in everyday situations, individuals will be interacting with social robots in a variety of contexts. Centered on the use of human-to-human interaction scripts, the current study hypothesized that individuals would be more uncertain, have less liking and anticipate less social presence when they a...

Social media have emerged as increasingly important sources through which the public seeks information concerning crises or risks. Despite this increased dependence, little is known about the psychological processes associated with perceptions of source credibility or the desire to seek additional information related to the risk. The current study...

Because robots and other electronic agents perform increasingly social functions, people will soon face the possibility of more frequent human–robot interactions. But what kinds of expectations do people bring with them into these potential interactions? Based on the possibility of a human-to-human interaction script, the current research hypothesi...

In this study, individuals in long-distance and geographically close romantic relationships were surveyed to determine whether there were differences in regards to relationship maintenance, relationship satisfaction, and affectionate communication via Facebook. Further, this study explored whether individuals differed on the aforementioned dependen...

The purpose of this experiment was to test the influence of mixed reviews appearing as computer-mediated word-of-mouth communication (WOM) on student perceptions of instructors (attractiveness and credibility) and attitudes toward learning course content (affective learning and state motivation). Using the heuristic-systematic processing model, it...

There is robust agreement that family is central to human experience and that communication plays a central role in family life. However, there is little lay or scholarly agreement regarding appropriate conceptualizations of “the family” or “communication.” The current study examined the relationship between individuals' definitions of family and p...

The purpose of this study was to experimentally test the influence of expectancies formed through computer-mediated word-of-mouth communication (WOM) on student learning. Increasingly, students rely on computer-mediated WOM through sites such as RateMyProfessors.com to aid in the process of information-gathering and course selection. It was hypothe...

A waning sense of community has been well documented and widely accepted as among the most significant problems of our time. Both social capital (trust in others and civic participation) and interpersonal acts of assistance (or helping) are considered to be common indicators of community. The question of whether certain personally held beliefs abou...

The purpose of this study was to experimentally test the influence of computer-mediated word-of-mouth communication (WOM) on student perceptions of instructors (attractiveness and credibility) and on student attitudes toward learning course content (affective learning and state motivation). It was hypothesized that students who receive positive com...

This study explores how members of StreetWise organize for survival and social change. Through the publication of a street journal by the same name, StreetWise provides employment opportunities for men and women without homes. Using feminist principles of organizing as a backdrop, we highlight the discursive moves that (1) reinforce StreetWise's st...

Although much scholarly attention has been devoted to conceptualizing communication, few attempts have been made to examine the practical consequences of individuals’ beliefs about communication. This paper reports the results of an initial investigation into the relationships among personal theories of communication (or message design logics), pri...

Based on an analysis of articles in health communication journals and in regional, national, and international communication journals, this study identifies publication trends and research priorities for health communication articles in the 1990s and the year 2000. Based on a content analysis of article abstracts, researchers determined the extent...

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between student pre‐performance concerns, student evaluation apprehension, and receiving a grade for a speech. It was hypothesized that in the public speaking course, (a) a positive relationship would exist between student pre‐performance concerns and student evaluation and (b) students who...

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Ohio University, June, 2006. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 163-176)