More Than Meets the Eye? An Experimental Design to Test Robot Visual Perspective-Taking Facilitators Beyond Mere-Appearance

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Visual Perspective Taking (VPT) underpins human social interaction, from joint action to predicting others' future actions and mentalizing about their goals and affective/mental states. Substantial progress has been made in developing artificial VPT capabilities in robots. However, as conventional VPT tasks rely on the (non-situated, disembodied) presentation of robots on computer screens, it is unclear how a robot's socially reactive and goal-directed behaviours prompt people to take its perspective. We provide a novel experimental paradigm that robustly measures the extent to which human interaction partners take a robot's visual perspective during face-to-face human-robot-interactions, by measuring how much a robot's visual perspective is spontaneously integrated with one's own. The experimental task design of our upcoming user study allows us to investigate the role of robot features beyond its human-like appearance, which have driven research so far, targeting instead its socially reactive behaviour and task engagement with the human interaction partner.