Abstract
A deeper understanding of the human side of human-robot interaction determined by studying the human brain when we perceive robots should help solve the biggest challenges of successful social encounters with robots. However, current social neuroscience studies mainly focus on explicit perception of robots, and implicit perception of robots is rather unexplored. Here, our behavioral analysis indicated that despite self-reported positive attitudes, participants had negative implicit attitudes toward humanoid robots. Our neuroimaging analysis indicated that subthreshold presentation of humanoid robot vs. human images led to significant left amygdala activation that was associated with negative implicit attitudes toward robots. After successfully weakening the negative attitudes, the left amygdala response to subthreshold presentation of humanoid robot images decreased, and the decrease in the left amygdala response was positively associated with the decrease in negative attitudes. Our results reveal that the processing of information about humanoid robots displays automaticity with regard to the recruitment of amygdala activation. Our findings that people may implicitly perceive humanoid robots as a threat may guide more appropriate interaction with social robots.
Significance statement Social interactions with robots are one of the biggest challenges in robotics, which necessitates a deeper understanding of how people perceive robots. Our results reveal automaticity for processing information about humanoid robots similar to that previously evident for threats. Given the effort currently being put into the development of robots for daily assistance, studying implicit perception of robots could be a step toward building smooth human-robot social relationships.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
We have deleted content related to the monocular advantage and added results of available humanoid IAT, positive adjective IAT, and neutral intervention group.
https://rec.ustc.edu.cn/share/1f97a050-7745-11ec-bbe8-61ef14e3189d