A Psychophysical View on User Acceptance of Robotic Systems for Social Applications

The paper focuses on the educational relevance of adopting a psychophysical approach towards study of some human responses to technologically and socially ambiguous stimuli, such as the ‘uncanny valley’ effect and psychological reactance to advice, given by a robot. It provides an account of the response to these effects as obeying some lawful dependence, similar to the perceptual laws, established and studied in psychophysics and experimental psychology. The results of a pilot study for rating agents with different degree of human likeness along several dimensions is presented, supported by EEG data from the frontal area of the brain. The approach can be applied in human robot interaction and accessibility studies in educational context.