Project Details: Using Stereotypes to Reason about Interaction
Researcher: Alan Wagner
Psychologists note that humans regularly use categories to simplify and speed the process of person perception (Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000). Macrae and Bodenhausen suggest that categorical thinking influences a human's evaluations, impressions, and recollections of the target. The influence of categorical thinking on interpersonal expectations is commonly referred to as a stereotype. For better or for worse, stereotypes have a profound impact on interpersonal interaction (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996; Biernat & Kobrynowicz, 1997). Information processing models of human cognition suggest that the formation and use of stereotypes may be critical for quick assessment of new interactive partners (Bodenhausen, Macrae, & Garst, 1998). From the perspective of a roboticist the question then becomes, can the use of stereotypes similarly speedup the process of partner modeling for a robot?
This question is potentially critical for robots operating in complex, dynamic social environments, such as search and rescue. In environments such as these the robot may not have time to learn a model of their interactive partner through successive interactions. Rather, the robot will likely need to bootstrap its modeling of the partner with information from prior, similar partners. Stereotypes serve this purpose.
The goal of this project is to explore the creation and use of stereotypes by a robot to bootstrap the process of learning about new interactive human partners. Moreover, we hope to learn about the type of information necessary for a robot to model a human partner and how stereotypes fail.
Results
Publications
- Alan R. Wagner (2015). "Robots that Stereotype: Creating and Using Categories of People for Human-Robot Interaction." The Journal of Human-Robot Interaction, in press [pdf]
- Alan R. Wagner (2012). "Using Cluster-based Stereotyping to Foster Human-Robot Cooperation" Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2012). Vilamoura, Portugal, 2012. [pdf]
- Alan R. Wagner (2012). "The Impact of Stereotyping Errors on a Robot's Social Development" Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL-EpiRob 2012). San Diego, CA, 2012. [pdf]
- Alan R. Wagner (2010). "Using Stereotypes to Understand Ones Interactive Partner" Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2010), Extended Abstract. Toronto, Canada. [pdf]
Videos
- Overview of stereotype learning and usage work in presented during a demo. [video]
- Slides presenting a portion of this material. [video]
- A brief video depicting the robot learning the occupational stereotype of a firefighter within the bounds of a coordination game. [video]
- A brief video depicting the robot learning the occupational stereotype of a EMT within the bounds of a coordination game. [video]
- A brief video depicting the robot learning the occupational stereotype of a police officer within the bounds of a coordination game. [video]
- A brief video demonstrating the robot's use of stereotypes with observations of the person's actions to predict their appearance. [video]
- A brief video demonstrating the robot's use of stereotypes to determine which perceptual feature is most distinguishing. [video]