Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 487

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 15 of the 15 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Can Machines Think? Interaction and Perspective Taking with Robots Investigated via fMRI

Open access
Krach, Sören, Hegel, Frank, Wrede, Britta, Sagerer, Gerhard, Binkofski, Ferdinand, Kircher, Tilo·2008·PLoS ONE
DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0002597
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Background: When our PC goes on strike again we tend to curse it as if it were a human being.Why and under which circumstances do we attribute human-like properties to machines?Although humans increasingly interact directly with machines it remains unclear whether humans implicitly attribute intentions to them and, if so, whether such interactions resemble human-human interactions on a neural level.In social cognitive neuroscience the ability to attribute intentions and desires to others is being referred to as having a Theory of Mind (ToM).With the present study we investigated whether an increase of human-likeness of interaction partners modulates the participants' ToM associated cortical activity.Methodology/Principal Findings: By means of functional magnetic resonance imaging (subjects n = 20) we investigated cortical activity modulation during highly interactive human-robot game.Increasing degrees of human-likeness for the game partner were introduced by means of a computer partner, a functional robot, an anthropomorphic robot and a human partner.The classical iterated prisoner's dilemma game was applied as experimental task which allowed for an implicit detection of ToM associated cortical activity.During the experiment participants always played against a random sequence unknowingly to them.Irrespective of the surmised interaction partners' responses participants indicated having experienced more fun and competition in the interaction with increasing human-like features of their partners.Parametric modulation of the functional imaging data revealed a highly significant linear increase of cortical activity in the medial frontal cortex as well as in the right temporo-parietal junction in correspondence with the increase of human-likeness of the interaction partner (computer,functional robot,anthropomorphic robot,human).Conclusions/Significance: Both regions correlating with the degree of human-likeness, the medial frontal cortex and the right temporo-parietal junction, have been associated with Theory-of-Mind.The results demonstrate that the tendency to build a model of another's mind linearly increases with its perceived human-likeness.Moreover, the present data provides first evidence of a contribution of higher human cognitive functions such as ToM in direct interactions with artificial robots.Our results shed light on the long-lasting psychological and philosophical debate regarding human-machine interaction and the question of what makes humans being perceived as human.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1371/journal.pone.0002597

Cites

15 of 15 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 15 references

Cited by

Metadata

Authors
Krach, S., Hegel, F., Wrede, B., Sagerer, G., Binkofski, F., & Kircher, T.
Venue
PLoS ONE
Publisher
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Published
2008-07-09
Volume
3
Issue
7
Pages
e2597
ISSN
1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0002597
OpenAlex
W2012676995
Cited by
487
References
15
FWCI
23.89
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
gold

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.