Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We tested whether the AI driver could create a human-like ride experience for passengers based on 69 participants' feedback in a real-road scenario. We designed a ride experience-based version of the non-verbal Turing test for automated driving. Participants rode in autonomous cars as a passenger and judged whether the driver was human or AI. The AI driver failed to pass our test because passengers detected the AI driver above chance. We further investigated how human passengers ascribe humanness in our test. Based on Lewin's field theory, we advanced a computational model combining signal detection theory with pre-trained language models to predict passengers' humanness rating behaviour. We employed affective transition between pre-study baseline and corresponding post-stage emotions as the signal strength of our model. Results showed that the passengers' ascription of humanness would increase with the greater affective transition, indicating an important role of affective transition in passengers' ascription of humanness.