Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Many studies have demonstrated that motion can convey intentionality and mental goals; for example, how do we distin-guish between a moving avatar thats controlled by a human being and a moving AI agent thats controlled by a computer?To answer this question, we use the travelling salesman problem (TPS), since it has been widely studied and, when thenumber of targets is limited, can be resolved optimally by both computers and human beings, even though with the useof different computational strategies (MacGregor & Chu, 2000). We asked 25 online participants to evaluate the perfor-mance of 5 human subjects and one AI agent in solving the TSP. The performances varied in efficiency. Results show thatoptimality is correlated with the perceived humanness of the agent: a lower efficiency in carrying out the task is perceivedas a distinctly human characteristic. Future directions include the analysis of the agent’s gaze direction.