Abstract

The research presented in this paper aims to find out what affect cognitive biases play in a robot’s interactive behaviour for the goal of developing human-robot long-term companionship. It is expected that by utilising cognitive biases in a robot’s interactive behaviours, making the robot cognitively imperfect, will affect how people relate to the robot thereby changing the process of long-term companionship. Previous research carried out in this area based on human-like cognitive characteristics in robots to create and maintain long-term relationship between robots and humans have yet to focus on developing human-like cognitive biases and as such is new to this application in robotics. To start working with cognitive biases ‘misattribution’ and ‘empathic gap’ have been selected which have been shown to be very common biases in humans and as such play a role on human-human interactions and long-term relationships.