Willingness to Take the Perspective of Robots: Embodiment in VR as a Potential Intensifier

Noushin Jamaatlou

Advisor: Craig McDonald, Eileen Roesler, Psychology

Committee Members: Eva Wiese

Fuse at Mason Square, #2021
November 14, 2025, 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM

Abstract:

Perspective-taking is a core social-cognitive process that enables alignment in communication, coordination, and empathy. In human–robot interaction (HRI), however, this process is less intuitive because robots lack the cognitive and emotional cues that make human–human interaction seamless. This dissertation investigates whether virtual reality (VR) can serve as an effective tool for studying and enhancing humans’ visual perspective-taking (VPT) and empathy toward robots. It is composed of three manuscripts that collectively address this goal. The first manuscript comprises three studies examining whether humans spontaneously take a robot avatar’s visual perspective and how methodological factors such as medium (video vs. VR) and spatial placement shape this effect. The second manuscript investigates whether embodying a robot avatar in VR enhances VPT and empathy, with a focus on the role of the body ownership illusion (BOI). Although embodiment was successfully induced, no significant differences in VPT or empathy emerged between conditions. The third manuscript investigates whether visual group homogeneity among robot avatars (identical vs. varied) influences embodiment, VPT, or empathy, revealing no significant effects. Together, these manuscripts indicate that methodological context plays a greater role in shaping perspective-taking in HRI than embodiment or the composition of robot groups based on visual appearance. This work contributes methodologically by integrating VR-based paradigms into HRI research and theoretically by extending embodiment research from human–human to human–robot contexts, offering new insights into the mechanisms underlying human perspective-taking toward robots.