Mind Perception in Humanoid Agents has Negative Effects on Cognitive Processing

摘要

When interacting with other entities, we make inferences about their internal states using our own minds asmodels (i.e., mentalizing). This process relies on the rapid, automatic perception of a mind. In two experiments,we investigate whether these automatic processes of mind perception are impaired when interactingwith agents that are not easily classified as human or robot. We hypothesized that an agent falling on thecategory boundary between human and non-human (i.e., a humanoid) would be difficult to categorize andthat this ambiguity would result in increased cognitive load. In Experiment 1, participants rated agents withvarying degrees of humanness in terms of their ability to have internal states. The humanoid agent was perceivedas categorically ambiguous, as evidenced by the intermediate ratings of internal states. In Experiment2, participants categorized each agent as human or non-human in a forced-choice task. The humanoidagent produced less consensus and longer reaction times, indicating that the humanoid’s ambiguous mindstatus produces a cognitive conflict. These findings suggest that performance is negatively impacted by thepresence of agents that cannot be easily classified as human or non-human.