Robots and humans are becoming ever closer as technology increases, and now robots can be used for a form of therapy. Cognitively impaired residents of a not-for-profit nursing home were found to have decreased overall agitation over time after interacting with a robot cat (Libin and Cohen-Mansfield, 2004), similar to interactions with a plush-toy cat and (I assume) also real cats. Whilst the study was impaired due to its small sample size and short length of run-time, it shows us how robots can be used for therapeutic treatment and how they can be perceived as part of the world. People seem to be able to perceive robots as part of the living world, associating their past experiences with animals with robots that imitate the same animal (Libin et al). Whilst a love of real pets led to a higher level of satisfaction from a robotic version of the pet (in this case, the NeCoRo cat), yet a greater experience of real cats led to people saying that the cat “made unnecessary noise”. Here we encounter the uncanny valley.
Massive uncanny valley side note:Essentially, if something artificial becomes too realistic, people will experience negative reactions to it. We realise that it is merely imitating life, not experiencing it. For example, watch the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOqfrM8aiOQ I apologise for it being in Japanese, but its not the language that’s important. The robot does all the right human things, it looks at the person it’s talking to, offers to mike for a response, is making general movement as well but I personally find it just a bit creepy. A giant metal machine that responds to human interaction is fine, its being sold to the masses in the form of the Kinect, but the robot from the video was just a bit off, if it isn’t 100% perfectly human-like, we’ll realise whatever is wrong and it’ll bug us. We won’t be able to view the robot as a human.
Anyway, back to cats. So whilst people with an experience of real life cats found more problems with them than others, what about people who haven’t really had much experience? In another of Libin & Libin’s experiments (2004), the cat was given to two 8 year old girl, who became very emotionally attached to the robot, even creating the idea that the animal had a will that they did not want to push it against when it was required to perform an action that it could not.
It seems that whilst robotic humans are far from being able to breach the uncanny valley and become truly human like it is possible with animals. These interactions seem to be beneficial to development of empathy and relationships with other living creatures, whilst also having a theraputic effect for those suffering from dementia. We use previous experiences of real animals in our interactions with artificial ones, which seems to suggest that we view them as alive and real. There are a lot of ethical points around this, such as “Does an inability to treat anthropomorphised robots well indicate an inability to treat humans well?” as well as whether these robots deserve the same treatment as their real life counter parts. It is certainly an interesting topic and will become more relevant as the technology required for it becomes more and more powerful. If the uncanny valley is ever breached, the psychology of human – robot interactions will be fascinating to study.
References:
http://aja.sagepub.com/content/19/2/111.full.pdf+html Libin and Cohen-Mansfield cognitively impaired residents and NeCoRo interaction
http://www.robotherapy.org/person_robot%20interactions.htm Libin et al NeCoRo cat interaction
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=1347459&tag=1 Libin & Libin (2004) human-NeCoRo interactions, specifically see the end of the paper for the case studies.
This a really good blog. This may be not scientific enough to get me a good grade, but your blog reminded me of my childhood dog robot. It was kinda simple, but it barked, it walked, and i would wag it’s tail and make friendly noises when i put the magnetic bone next to his mouth. It was mazing. And i got extremely attached to it, i treated it like a real dog, because i wasn’t allowed a real one at the time, i actually would go for walks with him (I would put him in my little pink pram, but the sentiment still counts). Anyway, when he broke, i was extremely unhappy, and i felt like a have lost my best friend with whom i could share my days’ stories. I can definitely see how animal robots can breach the boundary and if they are made even more advanced than my dog, than surely it mill be quite an experience for people to own one of them.
(this was the dog i had)