The nature of the bots: How people respond to robots, virtual agents and humans as multimodal stimuli

Li, Jamy

Abstract

This research agenda aims to understand how people treat robots along two dialectics. In the mechanical-living dialectic, fabricated entities are assessed against their organic counterparts to see if people respond differently to robots versus other people. Multiple experiments are conducted that compare human-robot relationships to human-human relationships by manipulating roles in videos of dyadic conversations shown to participants. In the physical-digital dialectic, a physically embodied robotic agent is compared to either a digitally-presented virtual agent (such as an animated character on a computer screen) or a digitally-presented robotic agent (such as a live video feed of the robot). The role of physical and digital embodiment and display medium are explored through a comprehensive survey and analysis of existing experimental works comparing physical and digital agents. Key research questions, related work, scope, research approach, current findings and remaining work are outlined.

Citation

Li, J. (2013, December). The nature of the bots: How people respond to robots, virtual agents and humans as multimodal stimuli. Presented at ICMI '13: 2013 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, Sydney, Australia

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: ICMI '13: 2013 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction
• Start Date: Dec 9, 2013
• End Date: Dec 13, 2013
• Online Publication Date: Dec 9, 2013
• Publication Date: 2013-12
• Deposit Date: May 7, 2024
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 337-340
• Book Title: ICMI 2013 - Proceedings of the 2013 ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction
• ISBN: 9781450321297
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2522848.2532193