Evaluating interactions with a cognitively biased robot in a creative collaborative task

Within the field of human-robot interaction (HRI), robots designed for social interactions are not only evaluated in terms of efficiency and accuracy. Factors related to the “personality” or “cognitive” ability of the robot such as perceived likability and intelligence are important considerations because they must engage with their human counterparts in deeper, more authentic and sometimes creative ways. Interactive art allows for the exploration of such interactions, however, the study of robots in interactive art remains relatively less commonplace and evaluations of these robots in creative contexts are similarly lacking. In this paper, we present an interactive robot inspired by Norman White’s The Helpless Robot (1987), which has been endowed with a cognitive bias known as the Dunning-Kruger effect and the ability to collaborate with participants in a creative drawing task. We evaluate the participants’ interactions with both biased and unbiased versions of this robot using the Godspeed Questionnaire Series (GQS), which has been modified to include measures of creativity, and relate these findings to analyses of their collaborative drawings. Our results indicate a significant difference between the versions of the robot for several measures in the GQS, with the unbiased version rated more positively than the biased robot in all cases. Analysis of the drawings suggests that participants interacting with the biased robot were less inclined to collaborate in a cooperative manner.