The Cognitive Characteristics of Communication with Artificial Agents

Abstract

The emergence of relationships between humans and artificial things in the home is analyzed from the perspective of attachment emotion. In this paper, we compare the cognitive activities of owners with attachment emotions and owners without attachment emotions; focusing in particular on the contrasts between owners of a toy doll with strong long-term attachment and short-term owners of a home robot who have not formed attachment. The method employed is protocol analysis which has been extended to the analysis of fan letters and interviews. The results indicate that attachment functions (a) to make human think more positively about things, (b) to elicit a specific action tendency, (c) to evoke the sense of subjective well-being, and (d) to enhance pro-social cognition.