Social cognitive science is the study
of how human minds navigate the social world.
I'm Xuan, a social cognitive scientist here at Brown.
After years of training in my Ph.D. program,
I feel pretty well-equipped to study how people perceive
and interact with other people.
But recently, I noticed that our social life might
be undergoing a major change.
Robots are beginning to enter our homes, schools,
and offices.
Researchers have even suggested that by the year 2025,
robots and artificial intelligence
will be present in nearly every aspect of our daily life.
This remarkable trend made me wonder.
How would people perceive and interact with robots?
Do we view them as inanimate machines like a rice cooker?
Or do we view them as social partners?
And what factors determine how we view robots?
So I told myself, you are a social cognitive scientist.
You get to study this.
So where to start?
I decided to focus on a very basic, yet critical
social cognitive mechanism, visual perspective taking.
Because we all see the world from unique viewpoints,
one person's nine could as well be another person's six.
So visual perspective taking helps
us to see the world through each other's eyes
to help to close the fundamental perceptual gap
between different minds and to facilitate
subsequent social interactions.
Therefore, by understanding if people
find it intuitive to take a robot's perspective,
we can better understand if people view robots
as potential social partners.
But how to measure visual perspective taking?
In my previous research, I've developed a unique paradigm
where I presented people, thousands of people,
photos like this.
And always asked one simple question.
What number is on the table?
And then I calculated how many responded six to each photo
as the indicator of people's tendency
towards perspective taking in different scenarios.
One critical finding is when this guy
is gazing at or reaching for the number,
people were much more likely to take his perspective than when
he was merely present.
So gaze and reaching increased perspective taking.
Now, what if I replace this human with a robot?
Would people take a robot's perspective?
I then presented new participants one of the photos
here where this robot engaged in the same array of actions
as the human did.
It turned out that, even though people
were less inclined to take a robot's perspective, when they
see this robot looking at or reaching for the object,
many still responded six.
I then tried a different a different robot.
Again, visual perspective taking was
increased by gaze and reaching.
So people indeed took robot's perspectives.
But was it all about the magic of gaze and reaching?
Or is there something special about robots?
To find out, I first decided to present people
a cat demonstrating the same array of actions.
I don't know what your prediction is,
but as a cat lover, I find the data heartbreaking.
Almost no one took the cat's perspective.
So what's special about robots compared to a cat?
Here's one possibility.
A cat cannot read numbers, but robot might.
So maybe in order to take the other's perspective
we have to believe that the other can meaningfully
represent this object from its unique viewpoint.
To test this hypothesis, I then presented
people a highly human-like figure,
but made people believe that this
was either a state of the art robot or a mannequin.
A mannequin, of course, cannot read numbers.
But it turned out that people were perfectly fine
taking her perspective regardless
of whether she was a robot or a mannequin,
and even to the same extent as taking another human's
perspective.
So clearly, the capacity to read numbers is not the key.
It is the human-like appearance of a robot that
leads to perspective taking.
And the more human-like a robot appears,
the more perspective taking there is.
So taken together, this project shows
how our human minds intuitively respond to human behaviors
and appearance.
And critically, we do not restrict our social cognitive
mechanisms only to other humans.
We also share them with humanoid robots.
So of course, understanding how people perceive and interact
with robots is a much bigger challenge.
And my research is just a baby step
towards cracking this question.
But for me, it was also a giant leap.
I now realize that as a social cognitive scientist
my research scope is much bigger than what I previously thought.
In this upcoming era of robots and artificial intelligence,
social cognitive science is becoming
more relevant than ever.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]