Humans take the visuospatial perspective of robots and objects that imply social presence

Abstract

Visual perspective-taking (VPT) plays a crucial role in social interactions. Although the mechanisms behind VPT have been thoroughly studied in human-human interactions, there are only a few studies examining whether humans can also adopt the visuospatial perspective of machines such as robots or objects that have an implied social presence. Thus far, earlier work suggested that a human-like appearance is a major factor determining VPT. In the present study, we isolate the social presence aspect that is inherent to a human-like appearance to specifically assess whether the social presence on its own is sufficient to trigger VPT. In particular, we test whether participants can adopt the visuospatial perspective of an object that implies a social presence (i.e., a camera) and compare findings to an earlier study, in which we tested whether participants adopt the visuospatial perspective of a robot. We find that participants adopt the visuospatial perspective of a camera and that the magnitude of these effects do not differ from VPT effects for robots. These results expand on previous findings on this topic by showing that an object, which is associated with an implied social presence can already trigger VPT effects. Moreover, these findings are informative for the design of cost-effective social robots as camera-like features can already effectively trigger VPT mechanisms, which are highly relevant for smooth social interactions, and thus more costly human-like features are not necessarily required.