Android Pretending to Have Similar Traits of Imagination as Humans Evokes Stronger Perceived Capacity to Feel

The perception of robots as mindful enriches how humans relate to them. Given that congruence in perceived representations of the world enable humans to experience commonality in mental states (a shared reality), we propose that congruence between humans, and robots will encourage humans to attribute humanlike mental capacities to robots. To investigate this, we assessed the mental perceptions of a robot in a visual imagination task using Gray et al. mind perception scale, which evaluates experience (capacity to feel), and agency (capacity to plan and do). For each ambiguous picture in the designed task, humans, and a robot imagined an animal. The task was performed under six conditions (2 × 3: Lead/Follow for Low/Medium/High). In the Lead condition, the robot records its perceived animal first; in the Follow condition, the robot records after the human participant. The experiment had three different degrees of congruence: Low (0%), Medium (60%), and High (100%). The results showed that perceived experiences were higher in the Lead condition, suggesting that the robot is perceived to be empathetic. It is probable that the Follow condition was perceived as mimicry rather than shared reality. Therefore, the order of response may have played an important role in commonality in mental states. No differences were observed in the perceived agency across all conditions. These results suggest that the order of response affects how humans perceive the minds of robots. Additionally, we assessed a post-task questionnaire to evaluate the interpersonal closeness that the humans felt toward the android. The main effect was observed in the degrees of congruence. This result is in line with those of previous studies that report relationships across sharing of similarities and friendliness.