Towards an imperfect robot for long-term companionship: case studies using cognitive biases

Abstract

The research presented in this paper aims to find out what affect cognitive biases play in a robot's interactive behaviour for the goal of developing human-robot long-term companionship. It is expected that by utilising cognitive biases in a robot's interactive behaviours, making the robot cognitively imperfect, will affect how people relate to the robot thereby changing the process of long-term companionship. Previous research carried out in this area based on human-like cognitive characteristics in robots to create and maintain long-term relationship between robots and humans have yet to focus on developing human-like cognitive biases and as such is new to this application in robotics. To start working with cognitive biases `misattribution' and `empathic gap' have been selected which have been shown to be very common biases in humans and as such play a role on human-human interactions and long-term relationships.