Social signals, such as changes in gaze direction, are essential cues to predict others’ mental states and behaviors (i.e., mentalizing). Studies show that humans can mentalize with nonhuman agents when they perceive a mind in them (i.e., mind perception). Robots that physically and/or behaviorally resemble humans likely trigger mind perception, which enhances the relevance of social cues and improves social-cognitive performance. The current experiments examine whether the effect of physical and behavioral influencers of mind perception on social-cognitive processing is modulated by the lifelikeness of a social interaction. Participants interacted with robots of varying degrees of physical (humanlike vs. robot-like) and behavioral (reliable vs. random) human-likeness while the lifelikeness of a social attention task was manipulated across five experiments. The first four experiments manipulated lifelikeness via the physical realism of the robot images (Study 1 and 2), the biological plausibility of the social signals (Study 3), and the plausibility of the social context (Study 4). They showed that humanlike behavior affected social attention whereas appearance affected mind perception ratings. However, when the lifelikeness of the interaction was increased by using videos of a human and a robot sending the social cues in a realistic environment (Study 5), social attention mechanisms were affected both by physical appearance and behavioral features, while mind perception ratings were mainly affected by physical appearance. This indicates that in order to understand the effect of physical and behavioral features on social cognition, paradigms should be used that adequately simulate the lifelikeness of social interactions.

社会信号，例如注视方向的变化，是预测他人心理状态和行为（即心理状态）的基本线索。研究表明，当人类感知非人类行为时，他们可以与非人类行为者进行心理思考。在身体和/或行为上与人类相似的机器人可能会触发思维，从而增强社交线索的相关性并改善社交认知能力。当前的实验研究了心理感知的身体和行为影响者对社会认知过程的影响是否被社会互动的逼真度所调节。参与者与不同程度的物理（人性与机器人性）和行为（可靠与行为）机器人进行交互。随机）的人像，而社交注意力任务的栩栩如生则通过五个实验进行了操纵。前四个实验通过机器人图像的物理真实性（研究1和2），社交信号的生物合理性（研究3）和社交环境的合理性（研究4）来操纵栩栩如生。他们表明，类人行为会影响社会注意力，而外表则会影响心智感知等级。但是，当通过在现实环境中使用人和机器人发送社交线索来增加互动的栩栩如生性时（研究5），社交注意机制会受到外观和行为特征的影响，而心智感知等级却受到影响。主要受外观影响。