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Category: Project

Description: Human-Robot interaction is expected to have a massive impact on our social environment and our society. The main goal of this study was to determine under which conditions the mere presence of a humanoid robot, as a human being, can improve the performance of another individual and to identify the processes underlying this improvement. To investigate these processes, we conducted an experiment where a group of participants had a discussion with a robot while the other one only described it. In the subsequent task, participants carried out an attentional task in the presence of the robots. Here, we show for the first time that social interaction, in HRI, is one of the main factors of robotic presence effect. In particular, we report that a robot needs to be anthropomorphized to some extent to be considered as a valid social agent comparable to human. Moreover, in our experiment, social interaction changed the perception of robots to more attribution of human social characteristics and less mechanical ones.