Heinrich Mellmann, Polina Arbuzova, Dimosthenis Kontogiorgos, Magdalena Yordanova, Jennifer X. Haensel, Verena V. Hafner, and Joanna J. Bryson, HRI '24: Companion of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 750-754, 11 March 2024.
Transparency is recognized as a vital feature for understanding and predicting robot behavior. Another feature that affects interaction with robots is their anthropomorphism. The relationship between these remains under-explored but is postulated to be negative. We present a pilot study investigating the effects of robot transparency in human-robot interactions, where the robot has an anthropomorphic appearance. We asked participants to evaluate and interact with the humanoid robot Pepper to examine whether visualizing the robot’s goals and behavior affects perceived intelligence, anthropomorphism, and robot agency. Our preliminary findings suggest that users may attribute higher ratings of agency when interacting with a robot visualizing its goals. In this late-breaking report, we propose our experiment on the interplay between transparency and anthropomorphism in human-robot interaction and summarize insights from our preliminary pilot study.
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