Browsing by Subject "Human-robot interaction"

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Open Access
Autonomy and robotonomy: The role of gender
(2023-06) Aşkın, Gaye
This study examines how gender affects people's perception of autonomy in social robots. It investigates whether an agent's name (masculine/feminine/neutral/ technical/no-name) and type (human/robot) can impact agency, personification, competency, and gender evaluations and whether these evaluations are at an unconscious level. The study consists of a pre-study and a main study with 150 participants. Participants watched 4-second 18 videos in the main study and answered autonomy-related questions. They also completed three implicit association tasks, adapted according to the study's themes, autonomy, agents, and gender. ANOVA analysis was conducted to analyze the agent, naming, and gender effects for the explicit part. The d-score was calculated for all participants in the implicit part, and an ANOVA analysis was conducted. Regression analysis was conducted to determine gender attribution in the pre-study and main studies. Correlation analyses were also conducted to determine if explicit-implicit parts were correlated. Lastly, a thematic analysis was conducted for qualitative inputs in the explicit part and categorized into nine themes. The study found the main effect of action and agent in agency-level attribution. In competency and gender attribution, agents had no main effect in none of the name conditions. In the implicit part, women and men participants differed in men-independent/women-dependent association IAT-1. The other two IATs, women and men participants, responded similarly. The study suggests that name manipulation does not affect people's autonomy perception, but rather agent types and actions characteristics affect them. Furthermore, people's implicit and explicit answers do not predict each other.
Open Access
Explicit and implicit measurement of mind perception in social robots through individual differences modulation
(2022-06) Saltık, İmge
The attribution of mental states to the object or subject that an individual interacts with according to its appearance or behavior is called mind perception (Gray et al., 2007). Recent research on human-robot interaction has shown that robots can create mind perceptions like other agents under certain conditions. In addition, while the two dimensions of mind perception (Agency and Experience) are mostly controlled using explicit measurement methods in the literature, the use of implicit measurement methods in the measurement of mind perception is still almost nonexistent. In addition to this fundamental gap, studies examining mind perception in robots have investigated how appearance affects mind perception, while the effect of action perception almost again has never been observed. In this context, we investigated how robots affect mind perception by manipulating differences in action and appearance. Methodologically, we conducted our study using both the explicit measurement method and the implicit measurement method due to the gap in the literature. In this study, individual difference measurement was also used to observe the causes of different attributions in mind perception to robots. In the first study, participants (N=102) evaluated how the robots' performing different actions (biological, verbal and nonverbal communicative and neutral) and appearance (humanoid and mechanical) affect mind perception; in the second study, participants (N=185) evaluated the effect of robots' actions and appearances on mind perception in terms of implicit and explicit measurement methods. In addition, 11 individual difference measures were used to observe individual differences that modulate mind perception. Looking at the results, it has been observed in both studies that the action of robots affects mind perception. In the explicit measurement method, neutral behavior was found to create less mind perception than communicative and biological action. In the implicit measurement method, differences in reaction time were observed between communicative actions and biological \& neutral actions. Individual differences that modulate the perception of the explicit and implicit mind have been observed. According to this, intentionality of behavior, theory of mind, and perception of loneliness are core modulates for explicit mind perception, while negative mood primarily modulates implicit mind perception. Looking at the results, it was observed that the perception of action had an effect on the mind perception, the implicit and the explicit mind perception showed different patterns from each other, and the individual differences predicted the pattern of implicit and explicit mind perception.
Open Access
Multifaceted analysis of older adults’ and caretakers’ attitudes toward social robots
(2024-07) Çonka, Begüm
The global aging population is increasing drastically, bringing crucial concerns regarding the lives of older adults. Though older people generally prefer staying at their own homes while aging, it’s necessary to find solutions that will enhance their well-being and life quality since they experience many psychological and physical problems. This thesis focused on social robots’ role in enriching older adults’ environments, thus improving their healthspan by enhancing their psychological and physiological health. Therefore, aim of this thesis was to understand older adults’ and caretakers’ attitudes toward social robots. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with older adults (N=18) and caretakers (N=12). In the interviews, photos and videos of the three social robots with different abilities, appearances, and human-likeness levels were shown. These robots are the pet- like robot Aibo, the toy-like robot Paro, and the humanoid robot Pepper. Then, participants were asked to answer open-ended questions to explore their feelings about the robots, their preferences regarding meeting and interacting with them, and whether they would want to have these robots in their homes. Results were analyzed using sentiment analysis, which is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) method, and a qualitative analysis method, thematic analysis (TA). Sentiment analysis results demonstrate a differentiation in caretakers’ attitudes toward social robots. They perceived Paro negatively but responded positively to Aibo and Pepper. On the other hand, older adults seem to have similar attitudes toward the three robots. Three experts working in the field of human-robot interaction conducted the TA separately. Combining their analysis, a new model was created, and when all experts confirmed this model, four overarching themes emerged: I) Perceived and expected roles of the robot, II) Physical characteristics and de- sign features of the robot, III) Factors influencing acceptance of the robot, and IV) Disadvantages of the robot. Themes and sub-themes under the overarching themes differed partly between older adults and caretakers and across Aibo, Paro, and Pepper. The findings of this thesis contribute to the literature by comparing the attitudes toward three different social robots in Turkish culture with the adoption of a multifaceted design approach.
Open Access
“My robot friend”: Application of intergroup contact theory in human-robot interaction
(Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2022-09-29) Akay, Selen; Arslan, B.; Bağcı, S. C.; Kanero, J.
We present pilot data for one of the first comprehensive investigations of Intergroup Contact Theory [1], [2] in the context of human-robot interaction. Applying an actual intergroup contact procedure known to affect intergroup attitudes among humans (e.g., [3]), we examined whether human-robot interaction as a positive intergroup contact would change participants' evaluation of robots. Our data from 28 student participants ( N=15 in the interaction condition and N=13 in the no-interaction condition) suggest that after the participant and robot self-disclosed to each other (Fast Friendship Task), participants (1) felt more positive emotions towards robots, (2) perceived robots as warmer, and (3) identified robots as more similar to humans. These preliminary findings invite further research on the application of Intergroup Contact Theory in examining social human-robot interaction and its possible contributions to understanding human psychology.
Open Access
Studying mind perception in social robotics ımplicitly: the need for validation and norming
(Association for Computing Machinery, 2023-03-13) Pekçetin, T. N.; Barinal, Badel; Tunç, J.; Acartürk, C.; Ürgen, Burcu Ayşen
The recent shift towards incorporating implicit measurements into the mind perception studies in social robotics has come along with its promises and challenges. The implicit tasks can go beyond the limited scope of the explicit tasks and increase the robustness of empirical investigations in human-robot interaction (HRI). However, designing valid and reliable implicit tasks requires norming and validating all stimuli to ensure no confounding factors interfere with the experimental manipulations. We conducted a lexical norming study to systematically explore the concepts suitable for an implicit task that measures mind perception induced by social robots. Two-hundred seventy-four participants rated an expanded and strictly selected list of forty mental capacities in two categories: Agency and Experience, and in two levels of capacities: High and Low. We used the partitioning around medoids algorithm as an objective way of revealing the clusters. We discussed the different clustering solutions in light of the previous findings. We consulted on frequency-based natural language processing (NLP) on the answers to the open-ended questions. The NLP analyses verified the significance of clear instructions and the presence of some common conceptualizations across dimensions. We proposed a systematic approach that encourages validation and norming studies, which will further improve the reliability and reproducibility of HRI studies.