Deciding like Humans Do

With the objective of building robots that accompany humans in daily life, it might be favourable that such robots act humanlike so that humans are able to predict their behaviour without effort. Decision making is one crucial aspect of daily life. As Damasio demonstrated, human decisions are often based on emotions. Earlier work thus developed a decision making framework for artificial intelligent systems based on Damasio’s Somatic Marker Hypothesis and revealed that overall, the decisions made by an artificial agent resemble those of human players. This paper enhances this work in so far that a detailed evaluation of the first 30 decisions made by the modelled agent during this gambling task was done by human subjects. Therefore 26 human participants were recruited who had to evaluate different graphical outputs that visualized the course of the Iowa Gambling Task played by either a modelled agent or a human. The results revealed that participants tend to categorize the course of the game as human, even if it was from the modelled agent. Furthermore, the evaluation of the different courses showed that participants were not able to differentiate between modelled and human output, but they were able to differentiate these from random courses of the game.