Treat robots as humans? Perspective choice in human-human and human-robot spatial language interaction

ABSTRACT Spatial language interaction is critical for human-robot interactions. However, previous findings are inconsistent in people’s perspective choices for robots and humans. In two experiments, participants viewed complex spatial layouts and verbally instructed an imagined human or robot addressee to find the target location or route. In both tasks, participants only tended to describe from humans‘ but not robots’ perspective, at the cost of taking more time to generate instructions for humans than robots. The results showed that spatial language interaction is not only a spatial but also a social task, and people do not regard robots as human-like social partners.