Fast Communicative Interactions and Perceptions of Agency

The capability to engage in conversation is the hallmark of our species
and possibly an important factor for a machine to be considered a social other. In contrast to the recent advances in text-based natural language processing in the form of large language models, embodied, multimodal speech-based interaction relies on rapid interpersonal processes. Some of these processes appear to be automatic or semi-automatic, indicating that not everything that happens in conversations is under conscious control.
While research into the exact details and technical implementation of these
processes is still in its early stages, we have found indications that a human interactor's perception of a robot at least partially hinges on whether a robot can engage in these processes at the required speed. In this short paper, I will present two such interactions and the "pull" that a timely and appropriate response exerts on the human interactor.
From a more theoretical perspective, the presented observations are broadly in
support of Seibt's, Vestergaard's, and Damholdt's proposal to occasionally replace references to anthropomorphization with the notion of sociomorphing when explaining a person's apparent attribution of social qualities to a robot. Where anthropomorphization requires conscious and slow high-level cognitive processes, sociomorphing as a variant of direct perception may be automatic, fast, and sub- or preconscious.