Browsing by Author "Urgen, Burcu A."
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Item Open Access Audio–visual predictive processing in the perception of humans and robots(Springer Science and Business Media B.V., 2023-04-05) Sarıgül, B.; Urgen, Burcu A.Recent work in cognitive science suggests that our expectations affect visual perception. With the rise of artificial agents in human life in the last few decades, one important question is whether our expectations about non-human agents such as humanoid robots affect how we perceive them. In the present study, we addressed this question in an audio–visual context. Participants reported whether a voice embedded in a noise belonged to a human or a robot. Prior to this judgment, they were presented with a human or a robot image that served as a cue and allowed them to form an expectation about the category of the voice that would follow. This cue was either congruent or incongruent with the category of the voice. Our results show that participants were faster and more accurate when the auditory target was preceded by a congruent cue than an incongruent cue. This was true regardless of the human-likeness of the robot. Overall, these results suggest that our expectations affect how we perceive non-human agents and shed light on future work in robot design.Item Open Access Gendered actions with a genderless robot: gender attribution to humanoid robots in action(Springer Science and Business Media B.V., 2023-01-20) Aşkın, Gaye; Saltık, İmge; Elver Boz, Tuğçe; Urgen, Burcu A.The present study aims to investigate how gender stereotypes affect people’s gender attribution to social robots. To this end, we examined whether a robot can be assigned a gender depending on a performed action. The study consists of 3 stages. In the first stage, we determined masculine and feminine actions by a survey conducted with 54 participants. In the second stage, we selected a gender-neutral robot by having 76 participants rate several robot stimuli in the masculine-feminine spectrum. In the third stage, we created short animation videos in which the gender-neutral robot determined in stage two performed the masculine and feminine actions determined in stage one. We then asked 102 participants to evaluate the robot in the videos in the masculine-feminine spectrum. We asked them to rate the videos according to their own view (self-view) and how they thought society would evaluate them (society-view). We also used the Socialization of Gender Norms Scale (SGNS) to identify individual differences in gender attribution to social robots. We found the main effect of action category (feminine vs. masculine) on both self-view reports and society-view reports suggesting that a neutral robot was reported to be feminine if it performed feminine actions and masculine if it performed masculine actions. However, society-view reports were more pronounced than the self-view reports: when the neutral robot performed masculine actions, it was found to be more masculine in the society-view reports than the self-view reports; and when it performs feminine actions, it was found to be more feminine in the society-view reports than the self-view reports. In addition, the SGNS predicted the society-view reports (for feminine actions) but not the self-view reports. In sum, our study suggests that people can attribute gender to social robots depending on the task they perform.Item Open Access Mind perception and social robots: the role of agent appearance and action types(Association for Computing Machinery, 2021-03-08) Saltık, İmge; Erdil, Deniz; Urgen, Burcu A.Mind perception is considered to be the ability to attribute mental states to non-human beings. As social robots increasingly become part of our lives, one important question for HRI is to what extent we attribute mental states to these agents and the conditions under which we do so. In the present study, we investigated the effect of appearance and the type of action a robot performs on mind perception. Participants rated videos of two robots in different appearances (one metallic, the other human-like), each of which performed four different actions (manipulating an object, verbal communication, non-verbal communication, and an action that depicts a biological need) on Agency and Experience dimensions. Our results show that the type of action that the robot performs affects the Agency scores. When the robot performs human-specific actions such as communicative actions or an action that depicts a biological need, it is rated to have more agency than when it performs a manipulative action. On the other hand, the appearance of the robot did not have any effect on the Agency or the Experience scores. Overall, our study suggests that the behavioral skills we build into social robots could be quite important in the extent we attribute mental states to them.Item Open Access Task-dependent warping of semantic representations during search for visual action categories(The Journal of Neuroscience, 2022-08-31) Shahdloo, Mo; Çelik, Emin; Urgen, Burcu A.; Gallant, J.L.; Çukur, TolgaObject and action perception in cluttered dynamic natural scenes relies on efficient allocation of limited brain resources to prioritize the attended targets over distractors. It has been suggested that during visual search for objects, distributed semantic representation of hundreds of object categories is warped to expand the representation of targets. Yet, little is known about whether and where in the brain visual search for action categories modulates semantic representations. To address this fundamental question, we studied brain activity recorded from five subjects (one female) via functional magnetic resonance imaging while they viewed natural movies and searched for either communication or locomotion actions. We find that attention directed to action categories elicits tuning shifts that warp semantic representations broadly across neocortex and that these shifts interact with intrinsic selectivity of cortical voxels for target actions. These results suggest that attention serves to facilitate task performance during social interactions by dynamically shifting semantic selectivity toward target actions and that tuning shifts are a general feature of conceptual representations in the brain.