Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People increasingly interact with different types ofautonomous robotic systems, ranging from humanoid socialrobots to driverless vehicles. But little is known about howpeople interpret the behavior of such systems, and inparticular if and how they attribute cognitive capacities andmental states to them. In a study concerning people’sinterpretations of autonomous car behavior, building on ourprevious research on human-robot interaction, participantswere presented with (1) images of cars – either with orwithout a driver – exhibiting various goal-directed trafficbehaviors, and (2) brief verbal descriptions of that behavior.They were asked to rate the extent to which these behaviorswere intentional and judge the plausibility of different typesof causal explanations. The results indicate that people (a)view autonomous car behavior as goal-directed, (b)discriminate between intentional and unintentionalautonomous car behaviors, and (c) view the causes ofautonomous and human traffic behaviors similarly, in termsof both intentionality ascriptions and behavior explanations.However, there was considerably lower agreement inparticipant ratings of the driverless behaviors, which mightindicate an increased difficulty in interpreting goal-directedbehavior of autonomous systems.