Human Interpretation of Goal-Directed Autonomous Car Behavior

• People increasingly interact with different types of autonomous robotic systems, ranging from humanoid social robots to driverless vehicles. But little is known about how people interpret the behavior of such systems, and in particular if and how they attribute cognitive capacities and mental states to them. In a study concerning people’s interpretations of autonomous car behavior, building on our previous research on human-robot interaction, participants were presented with (1) images of cars – either with or without a driver – exhibiting various goal-directed traffic behaviors, and (2) brief verbal descriptions of that behavior. They were asked to rate the extent to which these behaviors were intentional and judge the plausibility of different types of causal explanations. The results indicate that people (a) view autonomous car behavior as goal-directed, (b) discriminate between intentional and unintentional autonomous car behaviors, and (c) view the causes of autonomous and human traffic behaviors similarly, in terms of both intentionality ascriptions and behavior explanations. However, there was considerably lower agreement in participant ratings of the driverless behaviors, which might indicate an increased difficulty in interpreting goal-directed behavior of autonomous systems.

Ämnesord

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Robotteknik och automation (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Robotics (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Människa-datorinteraktion (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Human Computer Interaction (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Datavetenskap (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Computer Sciences (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Autonomous cars

self-driving

human-robot interaction

folk psychology

human-robot interaction

attribution

behavior explanation

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

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