An intentional framework improves memory for a robot´s actions

Although a number of recent studies have explored people´s concepts about robots, almost no research has tested the degree to which these concepts affect people´s capacity to understand and remember a robot´s actions. In this study, we tested whether a narrative describing a robot performing basic intentional acts would be easier to remember than a narrative that described similar non-intentional actions. Participants read one of two stories about a robot in which it was either described as having intentional or non-intentional mental representations. Participants who read about the intentional robot were more likely to recall information about the robotic agent, but there was no difference between the two groups in accuracy for questions unrelated to the agent. Additionally, participants who read about the intentional robot were marginally more likely to falsely recall a non-present object that was similar to the objects that the robot did interact with. We conclude that beliefs about a robot affect encoding and recall of its actions, possibly due to a focus on the type of information the agent is believed to “mentally” represent.