Beschreibung
by Prof. Linda Onnasch
It is widely assumed that anthropomorphic design features of robots automatically activate social perceptions and scripts from human interaction. Perceiving robots as team partners rather than tools is believed to foster more intuitive and seamless interaction, even at first encounter. But do human-like design features really elicit mind perception, and does this, in turn, translate into social evaluations, for example, in terms of empathy and trust, and ultimately improved coordination?
In my talk, I will explore these questions with a nuanced perspective on anthropomorphism as a design strategy across various contexts. Eventually, I will raise the question of how the social perception of robots affects self-attribution and the sense of agency in human-robot interaction.
Linda Onnasch is professor of psychology of action and automation at Technische Universität Berlin, Germany. Her research focuses on human-technology interaction considering system characteristics, psychological mediators and context factors. Together with her team, she investigates, for instance, how to integrate inherently social interaction patterns into human-robot collaboration to make interaction more intuitive, what explainable AI needs to explain to promote human-AI synergy, and how to allocate tasks between human and automation for appropriate overall performance. In national and international projects, she investigates how to design automation and decision support systems for high-tech agricultural systems (CUBES Circle: https://cubescircle.de/en/, AgRimate: https://agrimate-project.eu/). Linda is the Europe Chapter President of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, and member of the spokesteam engineering psychology of the German Psychological Society.