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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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Mind perception can induce a cognitive conflict for agents with ambiguous physical appearance. (A) Effects of mind perception triggered by physical appearance can be measured using a morphing procedure (e.g., image of a robot is morphed into image of a human or a dog in steps of 5%). (B) Mind perception follows a qualitative (i.e., significant changes in mind ratings occur only after a critical level of physical humanness is reached) rather than a quantitative pattern (i.e., likelihood for perceiving mind increases in a linear fashion with physical humanness). The significant change in mind ratings occurs when the category boundary between human and non-human is crossed (upper panel). Agents located at the category boundary are ambiguous in terms of their mind status, and trying to categorize them as human versus non-human causes a cognitive conflict, which takes cognitive resources to resolve. The degree of cognitive conflict that is induced by a categorical decision can be measured using mouse-tracking (i.e., the more curved the mouse movement, the larger the cognitive conflict; see Freeman and Ambady, 2010). For more details regarding the experiment on cognitive conflict in HRI: Weis and Wiese (2017).