Everyone in the ophthalmic sector will understand the importance of eyes, but scientists are now also realising their value in a completely different industry.
A study published in in Consciousness and Cognition has shown that when interacting with robots, the simple presence of eyes strongly shapes how humans perceive the machine’s mental abilities.
The findings demonstrated that people are more likely to believe a robot is capable of independent action and emotional experience if it has a pair of eyes.
“Humanoid robots are becoming increasingly common in social environments, meaning that people are now expected to engage with artificial agents in ways that resemble human interaction,” study author Samuli Linnunsalo, a postdoctoral researcher in the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Tampere University, Finland, told PsyPost.
“Prior research shows that humans rely heavily on eyes to convey information during social exchanges, and that people may even respond to robotic eye gaze as if it carries social intent.
“Yet, despite this, surprisingly many new humanoid robots are designed without eyes. Because successful human-robot interaction depends on humans perceiving robots as having mental abilities, we wanted to examine whether simply adding eyes influences our tendency to attribute mental capacities to robots.”
To do that, they recruited 200 people from Western, English-speaking countries for two different online experiments.
Using an artificial intelligence image generator to create 48 highly realistic pictures of humanoid robots with full bodies, they produced two versions of each robot identity: one with eyes and one without.
Each person viewed 24 robot images and answered four specific questions about each machine’s capabilities.
The scientists found that the addition of eyes increased perceived agency and experience even more for child-looking robots than for adult-looking robots.
Additionally, robots with digital screen faces tended to receive slightly higher ratings than those with physical, humanoid faces.
In the second experiment, 100 new adult participants completed a to test measure underlying biases by tracking how quickly a person pairs specific images with specific words.
The results aligned perfectly with the first experiment, showing a strong, automatic mental link between the presence of eyes and higher levels of both agency and experience.
“We were surprised by the consistency of results across self-reports and the Implicit Association Test,” Linnunsalo said.
“Even when people weren’t consciously evaluating the robots, their automatic responses still showed the same bias toward robots with eyes. This suggests that the effect is robust and deeply rooted in human social cognition.”
