Adopting the Intentional Stance Affects Social Attention When Interacting With a Humanoid Robot

Joint attention is a fundamental mechanism of human social cognition. Traditionally, joint attention has been experimentally investigated by means of the gaze cueing task in screen-based settings. Recently, the gaze cueing task has been implemented in more naturalistic and interactive settings, also with the embodied iCub robot, allowing for the investigation of concurrent factors influencing joint attention. Previous studies found that a communicative gaze before the gaze cue (i.e., mutual or avoiding gaze with the participants) influenced the subsequent joint attention by eliciting the gaze cueing effect only in the mutual gaze condition. In the present work, we first increased the likelihood of adoption of the Intentional Stance toward the robot by letting participants engage in a shared activity with the robot. Subsequent to this, we integrated the gaze cueing paradigm with the iCub robot, such that the robot cued participants' attention after establishing either mutual or avoiding gaze with them. In contrast to previous studies where the adoption of the Intentional Stance was not manipulated, our present results show that when the robot was perceived as an intentional agent, a gaze cueing effect was present for both mutual and avoiding gaze, thereby suggesting that participants might have interpreted both gaze conditions as intentional (and, thus, as communicative signals).