Determining the effect of human cognitive biases in social robots for human-robotm interactions
Mriganka Biswas · Lincoln Repository (University of Lincoln) · 2016
The research presented in this thesis describes a model for aiding human-robot interactions based onthe principle of showing behaviours which are created based on 'human' cognitive biases by a robot inhuman-robot interactions. The aim of this work is to study how cognitive biases can affect human-robotinteractions in the long term.Currently, most human-robot interactions are based on a set of well-ordered and structuredrules, which repeat regardless of the person or social situation. This trend tends to provide an unrealisticinteraction, which can make difficult for humans to relate ‘naturally’ with the social robot after a numberof relations. The main focus of these interactions is that the social robot shows a very structured set ofbehaviours and, as such, acts unnaturally and mechanical in terms of social interactions. On the otherhand, fallible behaviours (e.g. forgetfulness, inability to understand other’ emotions, bragging, blamingothers) are common behaviours in humans and can be seen in regular social interactions. Some of thesefallible behaviours are caused by the various cognitive biases. Researchers studied and developedvarious humanlike skills (e.g. personality, emotions expressions, traits) in social robots to make theirbehaviours more humanlike, and as a result, social robots can perform various humanlike actions, suchas walking, talking, gazing or emotional expression. But common human behaviours such asforgetfulness, inability to understand other emotions, bragging or blaming are not present in the currentsocial robots; such behaviours which exist and influence people have not been explored in social robots.The study presented in this thesis developed five cognitive biases in three different robots infour separate experiments to understand the influences of such cognitive biases in human–robotinteractions. The results show that participants initially liked to interact with the robot with cognitivebiased behaviours more than the robot without such behaviours. In my first two experiments, the robots(e.g., ERWIN, MyKeepon) interacted with the participants using a single bias (i.e., misattribution andempathy gap) cognitive biases accordingly, and participants enjoyed the interactions using such biaseffects: for example, forgetfulness, source confusions, always showing exaggerated happiness orsadness and so on in the robots. In my later experiments, participants interacted with the robot (e.g.,MARC) three times, with a time interval between two interactions, and results show that the likenessthe interactions where the robot shows biased behaviours decreases less than the interactions where therobot did not show any biased behaviours.In the current thesis, I describe the investigations of these traits of forgetfulness, the inabilityto understand others’ emotions, and bragging and blaming behaviours, which are influenced bycognitive biases, and I also analyse people’s responses to robots displaying such biased behaviours inhuman–robot interactions.