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LIT Robopsychology Lab
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The LIT Robopsychology Lab is currently researching how different robot voices affect humans.

35 sehr verschiedene Zeichnungen von Robotern, von menschengleich bis zu mechanischen Kästen

A current experiment conducted at the LIT Robopsychology Lab uses five different robot voices as auditory stimuli, varying from realistically human to strongly artificial sounds. Test persons listen to one of the five voices and then evaluate them with regard to different aspects: How pleasant does the voice sound to you? Does it even sound scary? In what area of application could you imagine being supported by a robot with such a voice? In health care? At home? At bank?

Besides, we explore the imagined visual representations that are induced by the heard type of voice. In a more playful part of the experiment, the test persons are asked to draw a robot that matches the voice that was played to them and, additionally, describe the visual characteristics of the imagined robot by text.

An artificial neural network is now to be used to automatically identify similarities in the sketches and to draw conclusions from a given sketch about the related voice stimulus or about socio-demographic characteristics of the drawer. Franz Berger, student research assistant at the LIT Robopsychology Lab, who is currently completing his master’s degree in Computer Science, supports us greatly in these matters.