The Effect of Individual Differences and Repetitive Interactions on Explicit and Implicit Attitudes Towards Robots

The exploitation of Social Assistive Robotics (SAR) will bring to the emergence of a new category of users, namely experts in clinical rehabilitation, who do not have a background in robotics. The first aim of the present study was to address individuals' attitudes towards robots within this new category of users. The secondary aim was to investigate whether repetitive interactions with the robot affect such attitudes. Therefore, we evaluated both explicit and implicit attitudes towards robots in a group of therapists rehabilitating children with neurodevelopmental disorders. The evaluation took place before they started a SAR intervention (TO), ongoing (Ti), and at the end of it (T2). Explicit attitudes were evaluated using self-report questionnaires, whereas implicit attitudes were operationalized as the perception of the robot as a social partner and implicit associations regarding the concept of "robot". Results showed that older ages and previous experience with robots were associated with negative attitudes toward robots and lesser willingness to perceive the robot as a social agent. Explicit measures did not vary across time, whereas implicit measures were modulated by increased exposure to robots: the more clinicians were exposed to the robot, the more the robot was treated as a social partner. Moreover, users' memory association between the concept of a robot and mechanical attributes weakens across evaluations. Our results suggest that increased exposure to robots modulates implicit but not explicit attitudes.