Over the past few years, engineers have developed increasingly advanced robotic systems already introduced in some public spaces and could soon be deployed in home environments. Many of these robots are humanoids, meaning that their body structure and physical features resemble those of humans.
As these robots are designed to interact with users and assist them during their everyday lives, understanding how humans perceive these robots is of the utmost importance. With many roboticists working on creating robots that closely mimic humans, some researchers have been trying to determine how robots’ physical features affect people’s beliefs about their minds and consciousness.
A research team at the University of Bremen recently carried out a study specifically exploring the extent to which humans perceive a humanoid robot’s mind differently based on whether it has eyes or not. Their findings, available on the preprint SSRN server, suggest that humans are more likely to believe that a robot has a “mind” if it has eye-like structures on its face than if it does not.
“Humans’ tendency to attribute mental states to robots positively correlates with the increasingly human-like appearance of the robots,” wrote Jari Hietanen, Samuli Linnunsalo and Dennis Küster in their paper. “As eyes have been suggested to be ‘the windows to the soul,’ in the present study, we investigated whether the presence or absence of facial features appearing as eyes in humanoid robots affects how perceivers attribute mind to robots.”
Humans are known to attribute special meanings to eyes, as they can sometimes express emotions or internal states. The researchers wished to determine whether the meanings often attributed to eyes also indirectly impact how people perceive humanoid robots, specifically the extent to which they have a “mind,” thus experiencing human-like thoughts or emotions.
“We created images of highly realistic humanoid robots with full bodies and showed these robots either with the eyes or without the eyes,” wrote Hietanen, Linnunsalo and Küster. “In Experiment 1, mind attribution was measured with self-evaluation questionnaires, whereas in Experiment 2, we used the Implicit Association Test (IAT).”
Hietanen, Linnunsalo, Küster and their colleagues carried out two different experiments, which involved 200 and 100 human participants, respectively. For each of these experiments, participants were shown images of different humanoid robots with or without eyes, which were created using the generative artificial intelligence (AI) platform Imagine Art.
For the first experiment, participants were asked to answer four questions after seeing the images of robots. The questions focused on the extent to which they thought the robot in the image could act with self-control and thought, tell right from wrong, experience emotion or possess a personality and consciousness.
For the second experiment, the researchers assessed the participants’ perceptions using the IAT. This psychological test is designed to measure people’s subconscious attitudes towards specific things by asking them to quickly make associations after seeing a picture or reading a word.
“Results from both explicit and implicit measurements showed that humans attribute higher levels of mind to humanoid robots with eyes (i.e. eyelike facial features) compared to robots without eyes,” wrote Hietanen, Linnunsalo and Küster. “Both measurements also showed that the presence of eyes increased the mind attribution ratings on both agency and experience scales.”
Overall, the findings gathered by this research team suggest that the presence of eyes on a humanoid robot’s face does influence the extent to which humans believe that it possesses human-like mental abilities, is a conscious being and can experience emotions. This study could inform future efforts to develop humanoid robots while potentially encouraging other researchers to investigate the possible psychological and ethical ramifications of believing that a machine has a mind.
More information:
Jari Hietanen et al, The Effect of Eyes on the Perception of Humanoid Robots’ Mind, SSRN (2025). DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.5139266.
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Robots with eyes more likely to be perceived as having a ‘mind’ (2025, February 27)
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