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. 2017 Oct 4;8:1663. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01663

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Copyright © 2017 Wiese, Metta and Wykowska.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

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Social facilitation effects in Human–Robot Interaction. Perceiving robot agents as having a mind can induce social facilitation effects on human performance (i.e., presence of a robot agent facilitates performance on simple tasks, but worsens performance on difficult tasks) and foster learning via social reinforcement (i.e., robot provides social cues like smiling for wanted behaviors). The facilitating and reinforcing abilities of companion robots can be used in the classroom to improve learning (left image) or during driving to verbally and non-verbally encourage wanted driving behaviors (right image), for example. Written informed consent has been obtained for publication of the identifiable image on the left. The image on the right was modified (the original image of the driving simulator was retrieved from http://stevevolk.com; the original image of the robot was retrieved from: http://newsroom.toyota.co.jp/).