HCC: Small: Manipulating Perceptions of Robot Agency

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Robots are increasingly becoming a part of daily human interactions: They vacuum floors, deliver medicine in hospitals, and provide company for elderly and disabled individuals. This project examines one aspect of people's interactions with these robots: how intentional and self-reflective the robot seems to be. Because the perceived agency of a robot affects many dimensions of people's interactions with that robot, it is important to understand how features of robot design, such as its behavior and cognitive abilities, affect perceptions of agency. This question is addressed through a series of laboratory experiments that manipulate behavior and cognitive abilities and measure the degree of agency attributed to socially interactive robots.Intellectual merit: The project will lead to new measures of perceived robot agency and new knowledge about how people collaborate with robots. The results will inform how engineers construct robots, how artificial intelligence researchers conceptualize behavioral architectures, and how designers craft interactions to produce robots that engage people in simple ways.Broader impacts: The project will provide a new quantitative measurement of agency that can be used in human-robot interaction and related disciplines and new information that can inform how agency is modeled in the design of human-robot interactions, especially in situations where recognition of agency is a primary factor. The outcomes will be used to improve socially assistive robotics for children with social deficits. The project will also enhance interdisciplinary research offerings for graduate and undergraduate students at the investigators' institution.