2008 Volume 20 Issue 4 Pages 500-512
An experimental investigation of how the appearance of the agents affects interpretations people make of the agents' attitudes is described. At first, we conducted a preliminary experiment to select eight artificial sounds among 44 ones that can make people estimate specific primitive attitudes. We then conducted a psychological experiment where participants were presented the artificial sounds selected in the preliminary experiment from three kinds of agents, e.g., a MindStorms robot, AIBO robot, and a normal laptop PC. Specifically, they were asked to select the correct attitudes based on the sounds expressed by these three agents. The results showed that the participants had higher interpretation rates when a PC presented the sounds, while they had lower rates when MindStorms and AIBO robots presented the sounds, even though the artificial sounds expressed by these agents were completely the same. In case of make people interpret the primitive attitudes like positive/negative, it requires that 1) expressing the imaginable information based on the agents' appearance and that 2) assigning the attributes whether the expressed information deviated from the natural energy flows.
