Examining Social Cognition with Embodied Robots: Does Prior Experience with a Robot Impact Feedback-associated Learning in a Gambling Task?

Social agents rely on the ability to use feedback to learn and modify their behavior. The extent to which this happens in social contexts depends on motivational, cognitive and/or affective parameters. For instance, feedback-associated learning occurs at different rates when the outcome of an action (e.g., winning or losing in a gambling task) affects oneself (“Self”) versus another human (“Other”). Here, we examine whether similar context effects on feedback-associated learning can also be observed when the “other” is a social robot (here: Cozmo). We additionally examine whether a “hybrid” version of the gambling paradigm, where participants are free to engage in a dynamic interaction with a robot, then move to a controlled screen-based experiment can be used to examine social cognition in human-robot interaction. This hybrid method is an alternative to current designs where researchers examine the effect of the interaction on social cognition during the interaction with the robot. For that purpose, three groups of participants (n total = 60) interacted with Cozmo over different time periods (no interaction vs. a single 20 minute interaction in the lab vs. daily 20 minute interactions over five consecutive days at home) before performing the gambling task in the lab. The results indicate that prior interactions impact the degree to which participants benefit from feedback during the gambling task, with overall worse learning immediately after short-term interactions with the robot and better learning in the “Self” versus “Other” condition after repeated interactions with the robot. These results indicate that “hybrid” paradigms are a suitable option to investigate social cognition in human-robot interaction when a fully dynamic implementation (i.e., interaction and measurement dynamic) is not feasible.