Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in each blank with a proper word given in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. perceived          B. tension          C. communicating       D. programmed       E. positively       F. interactions G. assigned            H. differed          I. constantly             J. reducing             K. affected

Empathy Machine

Robots are more prevalent in daily life than ever before. Digital assistants control smartphone apps, while physical bots teach students in schools and deliver food. Scientists have long been studying human-robot 【小题1】 to learn how these machines can influence individuals’ behaviour, such as altering how well someone completes a task or responds to a robotic request. But new research shows the way humans relate to other humans is also 【小题2】 by the presence and actions of robots.

“While other work has focused on how to more easily integrate robots into teams, we focused instead on how robots might 【小题3】 shape the way that people react to each other,” says Sarah Sebo, a graduate student at Yale University. To measure these changes in reactions, researchers 【小题4】 participants to teams of four — consisting of three people and one small humanoid robot(仿真机器人) — and had them play a collaborative game on Android tablets. In some groups, the robots were 【小题5】 to act “vulnerable”. These machines performed actions such as apologizing for making mistakes, admitting to self-doubt and talking about how they were “feeling”. In the control groups, the human participants teamed up with robots that made only neutral statements or remained entirely silent.

The researchers monitored how group members’ communication 【小题6】 depending on which type of robot was on each team. They found that people working with robots that showed vulnerability spent more time 【小题7】 with their fellow humans than did those in the control groups. Subjects with vulnerable robots also divided their conversation more equally between each human member of the team. These participants later reported that they 【小题8】 their experience as more positive, compared with those in the control groups. The robot’s vulnerable utterances helped the group to feel more comfortable in a task that was designed to have a high level of 【小题9】 .

Malte Jung, an assistant professor in information science at Cornell and a co-author of the study, says communicative robots could fundamentally change human behaviour for the better. Instead of merely 【小题10】 the amount of work employees do, these machines could make people more efficient, subtly influencing social dynamics to “help teams perform at their best”.