People excel at attributing intentionality to other agents, whether in simple scenarios such as shapes moving in two di-mensions or complex scenarios such as people interacting. We note that intentionality attributions seem to fall into two cat-egories: low-level intentionality in which an observer has a theory of mind about an agent, and high-level intentionality in which an observer believes the agent has a theory of mind about something else. We introduce the terms L-intentionality and H-intentionality to refer to these attributions, respectively, and describe this division by using examples from previous re-search. Social robots provide a particularly good platform for evaluating the presence of different types of intentionality, and we discuss how robots can help distinguish the relationship be-tween H- and L-intentionality, based on a number of possible models that we enumerate. We conclude by highlighting some interesting questions about intentionality in general and the in-terplay between H- and L-intentionality in particular.

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Recent technological developments like cheap sensors and the decreasing costs of compu-tational power have brought the possibility of robotic home companions within reach. In order to be accepted it is vital for these robots to be able to participate meaningfully in social interactions with their users and to make them feel comfortable during these interactions. In this study we investigated how people respond to a situation where a companion robot is watching its user. Specifically, we tested the effect of robotic behaviours that are synchro-nised with the actions of a human. We evaluated the effects of these behaviours on the ro-bot’s likeability and perceived intelligence using an online video survey. The robot used was Care-O-bot3, a non-anthropomorphic robot with a limited range of expressive motions. We found that even minimal, positively synchronised movements during an object-oriented task were interpreted by participants as engagement and created a positive disposition towards the robot. However, even negatively synchronised movements of the robot led to more posi-tive perceptions of the robot, as compared to a robot that does not move at all. The results emphasise a) the powerful role that robot movements in general can have on participants’ perception of the robot, and b) that synchronisation of body movements can be a powerful means to enhance the positive attitude towards a non-anthropomorphic robot.