Does Long-Term Exposure To Robots Affect Mind Perception? An Exploratory Study

Abstract

From cleaning houses to assisting airport passengers, robots are rapidly becoming an integral part of society. As they transition into a facet of the everyday environment, it’s important to understand how beliefs and behavior concerning these robots will change over time. While human-robot interaction research is common, there is a significant literature gap concerning long-term interaction with these agents. The current study seeks to better understand how exposure over a time-scale of months changes mind perception towards robots. This area of research is especially critical given that mind perception has been shown to influence behavior. A fortuitous deployment of robots across the authors’ university campus provided an unprecedented opportunity to study this interaction via a naturalistic experiment.