Waveform of distance between Rat A and the robot device for an arbitrary participant.

<p>Waveform of distance between Rat A and the robot device for an arbitrary participant.</p

Movement of rats and humans (a) Rat A with (b) corresponding participant, (c) Rat B with (d) corresponding participant.

<p>Axes are in metres, and all movements are measured in the rat arena. Hence the human movements are those of the slaved robot.</p

Screenshot of the virtual environment.

<p>Three of the four posters are visible in the image as well as the two avatars representing both the participant and the rat.</p

Distance between rat and robot by rat position.

<p>The vertical axis is the distance between the rat and robot corresponding to the position of the rat on the horizontal plane representing the rat arena. (a) Representing all 9 participants for rat A over trial 1 where the participants knew that the avatar represented a rat (b) The same participants for rat A over trial 2 where participants thought that the rat represented a remote human. (c) All 9 participants for rat B over trial 1. (d) The same participants over trial 2 for rat B.</p

Scatter diagram of the proportion of time that the rat was within a radius of 20 cm from the arena centre by the number of rat points over all participants, for both rats.

<p>The number of rat points is the number of collisions between rat and robot that occurred away from the correct poster for the human to obtain a point. The Pearson correlation is significant for each rat separately (Rat A: r = 0.70, P<0.04; Rat B: r = 0.82, P<0.008).</p

The rat arena and robot device.

<p>(a) Two of the pictures on the wall can be seen, and the frame on which a webcam was mounted for tracking purposes. (b) The e-puck robot protected by a purpose-made armour. For tracking purposes, a typical Augmented Reality marker was attached on top of the armour. The plastic platform in front was used to hold the food (strawberry jelly) for the rat. (c) Left hand side: View of the robot and rat for tracking. Right hand side: Result of the threshold used to detect the rat in the image.</p