Do You See what I See? Tracking the Perceptual Beliefs of Robots

Keeping track of others' perceptual beliefs—what they perceive and know about the current situation—is imperative in many social contexts. In a series of experiments, we set out to investigate people's ability to keep track of what robots know or believe about objects and events in the environment. To this end, we subjected 155 experimental participants to an anticipatory-looking false-belief task where they had to reason about a robot's perceptual capability in order to predict its behavior. We conclude that (1) it is difficult for people to track the perceptual beliefs of a robot whose perceptual capability potentially differs significantly from human perception, (2) people can gradually “tune in” to the unique perceptual capabilities of a robot over time by observing it interact with the environment, and (3) providing people with verbal information about a robot's perceptual capability might not significantly help them predict its behavior.