In two new studies, researchers sought
to measure how people responded to robots on an emotional and neurological
level. In the first study, volunteers were shown videos of a small dinosaur
robot being treated affectionately or violently. In the affectionate video,
humans hugged and tickled the robot, and in the violent video, they hit or
dropped him. Scientists assessed people's levels of physiological excitation
after watching the videos by recording their skin conductance, a measure of how
well the skin conducts electricity. When a person is experiencing strong
emotions, they sweat more, increasing skin conductance. The volunteers reported
feeling more negative emotions while watching the robot being abused.
Meanwhile, the volunteers' skin conductance levels increased, showing they were
more distressed.
In the second study, researchers
use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to visualize brain activity in
the participants as they watched videos of humans and robots interacting.
Again, participants were shown videos of a human, a robot, and, this time, an
inanimate object being treated with affection or abuse. In one video, a man
appears to beat up a woman, strangle her with a string and attempt to suffocate
her with a plastic bag. In another, a person does the same things to the robot
dinosaur. Affectionate treatment of the robot and the human led to similar
patterns of neural activity in regions in the brain's limbic system, where
emotions are processed, fMRI scans showed. But the watchers' brains lit up more
while seeing abusive treatment of the human than abuse of the robot, suggesting
greater empathy for the human.
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