Have you ever made eye contact with a robot? It can be a very strange experience. Now, researchers have found that it is more than just a feeling. They ran an experiment that showed how a robot's gaze (凝视) can trick people into thinking they are socially interacting (互动) with a human being. That empiric can slow a person's ability to make decisions.
"Gaze is an important social signal that we employ on a day-to-day basis when interacting with others," said Professor Agnieszka Wykowska. She is the lead writer of a study on the research.
"The question is whether the robot gaze will cause very similar mechanisms (机制) in the human brain as another human's gaze would,"Wykowska said.
The team asked 40 people to play a video game of "chicken." In the game, each player has to decide whether to permit a car to drive straight toward another car or to turn to avoid a crash. The people were playing against a human-like robot sitting across from them.
During breaks in the game, players had to look at the robot. Sometimes the robot would look back and other times it would look away. As the interactions happened, the scientists collected information on behavior and brain activity.
"Our results show that, actually, the human brain regards the robot gaze as a social signal, and that signal has an effect on the way we're making decisions, on the strategies we use in the game and also on our replies,"Wykowska said.
"The gaze of the robot affected decisions, so humans were much slower in making the decisions in the game," she added.
The findings could be useful in helping to decide where and how human-like robots might be placed in the future.
