More Than Meets the Eye? An Experimental Design to Test Robot Visual Perspective-Taking Facilitators Beyond Mere-Appearance

Visual Perspective Taking (VPT) underpins human social interaction, from joint action to predicting others' future actions and mentalizing about their goals and affective/mental states. Substantial progress has been made in developing artificial VPT capabilities in robots. However, as conventional VPT tasks rely on the (non-situated, disembodied) presentation of robots on computer screens, it is unclear how a robot’s socially reactive and goal-directed behaviours prompt people to take its perspective. We provide a novel experimental paradigm that robustly measures the extent to which human interaction partners take a robot’s visual perspective during face-to-face human-robot-interactions, by measuring how much a robot’s visual perspective is spontaneously integrated with one’s own. The experimental task design of our upcoming user study allows us to investigate the role of robot features beyond its human-like appearance, which have driven research so far, targeting instead its socially reactive behaviour and task engagement with the human interaction partner.