Human-like features in robot behavior: Response time variability can be perceived as human-like

Humans behave and act in a way that other humans can recognize as human-like. If humanness has specific features, is it possible to replicate these features on a machine like a robot? Researchers at IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology) tried to answer that question by implementing a non-verbal Turing test in a human-robot interaction task. They involved human participants and the humanoid robot iCub in a joint action experiment. What they found is that specific features of human behavior, namely response timing, can be translated into the robot in a way that humans cannot distinguish whether they are interacting with a person or a machine.