scholarly journals A Theory of Social Agency for Human-Robot Interaction

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Blake Jackson ◽  
Tom Williams

Motivated by inconsistent, underspecified, or otherwise problematic theories and usages of social agency in the HRI literature, and leveraging philosophical work on moral agency, we present a theory of social agency wherein a social agent (a thing with social agency) is any agent capable of social action at some level of abstraction. Like previous theorists, we conceptualize agency as determined by the criteria of interactivity, autonomy, and adaptability. We use the concept of face from politeness theory to define social action as any action that threatens or affirms the face of a social patient. With these definitions in mind, we specify and examine the levels of abstraction most relevant to HRI research, compare notions of social agency and the surrounding concepts at each, and suggest new conventions for discussing social agency in our field.

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Petra Gemeinboeck

This article lays out the framework for relational-performative aesthetics in human-robot interaction, comprising a theoretical lens and design approach for critical practice-based inquiries into embodied meaning-making in human-robot interaction. I explore the centrality of aesthetics as a practice of embodied meaning-making by drawing on my arts-led, performance-based approach to human-robot encounters, as well as other artistic practices. Understanding social agency and meaning as being enacted through the situated dynamics of the interaction, I bring into focus a process ofbodying-thinging;entangling and transforming subjects and objects in the encounter and rendering elastic boundaries in-between. Rather than serving to make the strange look more familiar, aesthetics here is about rendering the differences between humans and robots more relational. My notion of a relational-performative design approach—designing with bodying-thinging—proposes that we engage with human-robot encounters from the earliest stages of the robot design. This is where we begin to manifest boundaries that shape meaning-making and the potential for emergence, transformation, and connections arising from intra-bodily resonances (bodying-thinging). I argue that this relational-performative approach opens up new possibilities for how we design robots and how they socially participate in the encounter.


AI Magazine ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 19-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriel Skantze

When humans interact and collaborate with each other, they coordinate their turn-taking behaviors using verbal and nonverbal signals, expressed in the face and voice. If robots of the future are supposed to engage in social interaction with humans, it is essential that they can generate and understand these behaviors. In this article, I give an overview of several studies that show how humans in interaction with a humanlike robot make use of the same coordination signals typically found in studies on human-human interaction, and that it is possible to automatically detect and combine these cues to facilitate real-time coordination. The studies also show that humans react naturally to such signals when used by a robot, without being given any special instructions. They follow the gaze of the robot to disambiguate referring expressions, they conform when the robot selects the next speaker using gaze, and they respond naturally to subtle cues, such as gaze aversion, breathing, facial gestures and hesitation sounds.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nina-Alisa Hinz ◽  
Francesca Ciardo ◽  
Agnieszka Wykowska

Humans are influenced by the presence of other social agents, sometimes performing better, sometimes performing worse than alone. Humans are also affected by how they perceive the social agent. The present study investigat-ed whether individual differences in the attitude toward robots can predict human behavior in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Therefore, adult partic-ipants played a game with the Cozmo robot (Anki Inc., San Francisco), in which their task was to stop a balloon from exploding. In individual trials, only the participants could stop the balloon inflating, while in joint trials al-so Cozmo could stop it. Results showed that in joint trials, the balloon ex-ploded less often than in individual trials. However participants stopped the balloon earlier in joint than in individual trials, although this was less bene-ficial for them. This effect of Cozmo joining the game, nevertheless, was in-fluenced by the negative attitude of the participants toward robots. The more negative they were, the less their behavior was influenced by the presence of the robot. This suggests that robots can influence human behavior, although this influence is modulated by the attitude toward the robot.


2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew S. Prewett ◽  
Kristin N. Saboe ◽  
Ryan C. Johnson ◽  
Michael D. Coovert ◽  
Linda R. Elliott

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleanore Edson ◽  
Judith Lytle ◽  
Thomas McKenna

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Wykowska ◽  
Jairo Pérez-Osorio ◽  
Stefan Kopp

This booklet is a collection of the position statements accepted for the HRI’20 conference workshop “Social Cognition for HRI: Exploring the relationship between mindreading and social attunement in human-robot interaction” (Wykowska, Perez-Osorio & Kopp, 2020). Unfortunately, due to the rapid unfolding of the novel coronavirus at the beginning of the present year, the conference and consequently our workshop, were canceled. On the light of these events, we decided to put together the positions statements accepted for the workshop. The contributions collected in these pages highlight the role of attribution of mental states to artificial agents in human-robot interaction, and precisely the quality and presence of social attunement mechanisms that are known to make human interaction smooth, efficient, and robust. These papers also accentuate the importance of the multidisciplinary approach to advance the understanding of the factors and the consequences of social interactions with artificial agents.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cinzia Di Dio ◽  
Federico Manzi ◽  
Giulia Peretti ◽  
Angelo Cangelosi ◽  
Paul L. Harris ◽  
...  

Studying trust within human-robot interaction is of great importance given the social relevance of robotic agents in a variety of contexts. We investigated the acquisition, loss and restoration of trust when preschool and school-age children played with either a human or a humanoid robot in-vivo. The relationship between trust and the quality of attachment relationships, Theory of Mind, and executive function skills was also investigated. No differences were found in children’s trust in the play-partner as a function of agency (human or robot). Nevertheless, 3-years-olds showed a trend toward trusting the human more than the robot, while 7-years-olds displayed the reverse behavioral pattern, thus highlighting the developing interplay between affective and cognitive correlates of trust.


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