Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People interact differently with humans than they do with com-puters, but there is minimal research on what brings aboutthese differences. Using agents labeled as either “another par-ticipant” or a “computer program”, we investigated the differ-ences in people’s behavior and brain activity during the courseof a negotiation paradigm. Our results indicate that people per-ceive human-labeled agents more human-like than computer-labeled agents, and the level of concession in the negotiationsis dependent on agent type. We have also found that these dif-ferences can be captured in brain activation by showing thatparts of the Theory of Mind neural correlates are activated inhuman-labeled agent conditions, but not in computer-labeledagent conditions. We further demonstrate that brain activitycan predict whether the negotiation agent was introduced asa competing human player or a computer program. Overall,our study suggests that labeling an interaction partner as ei-ther another human or a computer program leads to significantimpacts on one’s decision making.