Do beliefs about a robot's capabilities influence alignment to its actions?

Interlocutors in a dialog align on many aspects of behavior (word choice, speech rate, syntactic structure, gestures, facial expressions, etc.). Such alignment has been proposed to be the basis for communicating successfully. We believe alignment could be beneficial for smooth human-robot interaction and facilitate robot action learning from demonstration. Recent research put forward a mediated communicative design account of alignment according to which interlocutors align stronger when they believe it will lead to communicative success. Branigan et al. showed that when interacting with an artificial system, participants aligned their lexical choices more to an artificial system they believed to be basic than to one they believed to be advanced. Our work extends these results in two ways: First, instead of an artificial computer dialog system, participants interact with a humanoid robot, the iCub robot. Second, instead of lexical choice, our work investigates alignment in the domain of manual actions. In an action demonstration and matching game, we examine the extent to which participants who believe that they are playing with a basic version or an advanced version of the iCub robot adapt the way they execute actions to what their robot partner has previously shown to them. Our results confirm that alignment also takes place in action demonstration. We were not able to replicate Branigan et al.'s results in general in this setup, but in line with their findings, participants with a low questionnaire score on neuroticism and participants who are familiar with robots aligned their actions more to a robot they believed to be basic than to one they believed to be advanced.