Cognitive Impact of Social Robots: How Anthropomorphism Boosts Performances

Abstract

Evidence shows that a robotic agent in the presence of a human can affect selective attention mechanisms in that human in the same way the presence of a fellow human can. However, it's uncertain whether this process stems from anthropomorphism attribution. We investigated this issue using a selective attention task in a social-presence paradigm. One group of participants performed the so-called Eriksen Flanker task (EFT) in the presence of a robot after a verbal social in teraction (i.e., socialrobot condition), while the other group did the same with a robot that the participants only described (i.e., nonsocialrobot condition). Results showed that, after social interaction, the robot was perceived as having human traits (according to the humanization and anthropomorphism scale). Furthermore, we found a socialpresence effect (i.e., an improvement in selective attention performance) only in the presence of the social robot but not in the presence of the nonsocial one. Finally, this latter effect was mediated by anthropomorphism attributions. Our results suggest that the influence of the robot?s presence is sociocognitive in nature and that anthropomorphism has a role in the robot-presence effect.