Social Attitude Towards a Robot is Promoted by Motor-Induced Embodiment Independently of Spatial Perspective

Humans can enter into social relations with robots through different spatial perspectives. In the telepresence perspective, the human sees through the eyes of the robot. In the face-to-face perspective the human faces the robot and interacts in a self-other relation. During robotic telepresence, we have shown that embodiment into robots can be promoted by reciprocal and synchronous stimuli in the form of intentional movements or passive tactile stimulations. Here we investigate the impact of different spatial perspectives coupled to these sensory-motor manipulations on human subjects’ social perception of robots. Through a series of experiments, we demonstrate that independent of the telepresence vs. face-to-face self-perspective, the sense of agency as induced by synchronous human-robot movements is crucial for generating positive changes of robot acceptability. We suggest that motor intentionality most clearly influences our social perception of robots.