Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Mind perception is studied for three different agents: a human,an artificial human, and a humanoid robot. The artificiallycreated agents are presented as being undistinguishable from ahuman. Each agent is rated on 15 mental capacities. Three mindperception dimensions are identified - Experience, Agency,and Cognition. The artificial agents are rated higher on theCognition dimensions than on the other two dimensions. Thehumanoid robot is rated lower than the human on theExperience dimension. These results show that people ascribeto artificial agents some mental capacities more than others. Ina second experiment, the effect of agent’s moral action on mindperception is explored. It is found that when the artificial agentshave undertaken a moral action, they are perceived to besimilar to the human agent. More interestingly, the presentationof the moral action leads to a restructuring of the dimensionsof mind perception.