Maha Salem, "Effects of Humanlike Conversational Behavior on the Perception of Psychological Anthropomorphism: A Case Study with a Humanoid Robot", ICSR 2011 : International Conference on Social Robotics 2011, 2011.

Previous work has shown that typically human conversa- tional behaviors such as gesturing increase anthropomorphic inferences about artificial communicators such as virtual agents. In an experiment with a humanoid robot, we investigated how far humanlike gesturing be- havior would affect anthropomorphic inferences about the robot. Partic- ularly, we examined the effects of the robot’s gesturing behaviors on the attribution of typically human traits, experienced psychological warmth with regard to the robot, shared reality and finally, perceived pleasant- ness of HRI. We hypothesized higher ratings on all dependent measures in the humanlike gesturing (vs. no gesturing) behavior condition. Our re- sults confirm our predictions: when the humanoid robot used humanlike gesturing during interaction, the robot was anthropomorphized more, participants felt more warmth and shared reality with it and experienced the interaction more positively than when the robot gave instructions using no gesturing behavior. These findings show that humanlike behav- iors in robotic systems affect both anthropomorphic perceptions and the mental models humans form of a humanoid robot during interaction.