Robot inquisition keeps witnesses on the right track

This is fascinating, and potentially very useful.

Robot inquisition keeps witnesses on the right track

Quote

MEMORY is a strange thing. Just using the verb "smash" in a question about a car crash instead of "bump" or "hit" causes witnesses to remember higher speeds and more serious damage. Known as the misinformation effect, it is a serious problem for police trying to gather accurate accounts of a potential crime. There's a way around it, however: get a robot to ask the questions.

Cindy Bethel at Mississippi State University in Starkville and her team showed 100 "witnesses" a slide show in which a man steals money and a calculator from a drawer, under the pretext of fixing a chair. The witnesses were then split into four groups and asked about what they had seen, either by a person or by a small NAO robot, controlled in a Wizard of Oz set-up by an unseen human.

Two groups - one with a human and one a robot interviewer - were asked identical questions that introduced false information about the crime, mentioning objects that were not in the scene, then asking about them later. When posed by humans, the questions caused the witnesses' recall accuracy to drop by 40 per cent - compared with those that did not receive misinformation - as they remembered objects that were never there. But misinformation presented by the NAO robot didn't have an effect.

"It was a very big surprise," says Bethel. "They just were not affected by what the robot was saying. The scripts were identical. We even told the human interviewers to be as robotic as possible." The results will be presented at the Human-Robot Interaction conference in Tokyo next month.

My guess is that interviewers are seen as authority figures in many cases, and this subconsciously influences the impact of their choice of words. Since the bot isn't seen as human, any erroneous input can be dismissed without triggering emotional concerns.

Which of course means that to be effective, you'd have to deliberately ensure that your bot fails the Turing Test.

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Topic: Robot inquisition keeps witnesses on the right track

osmanthus

OP - February 07, 2013, 11:38 PM

Ishina

Reply #1 - February 07, 2013, 11:44 PM

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