Describing interactions between objects often requires the speaker to choose a perspective and mention one object first and the other second. Speakers have a tendency to make the most animate object in a scene the subject of a sentence, and to mention this object first (Prat-Sala & Branigan, 2000). For example, it is more common to say the man ran away from the dog rather than the dog chased the man, therefore taking the perspective of the man. This animacy bias is considered to occur because of the way speakers perceive animacy: on a hierarchy, with humans at the top and concepts or inanimate objects below (Harris, 1978; Aissen, 2003). The current experiment follows on from the work detailed in a previous pre-registration, Study 1, which can be found here: https://osf.io/a5fby. Speakers viewed scenes of humans and robot interacting, and described these interactions using transitive sentences (e.g. “Fred is dancing with Botz”). We found speakers would reliably mention the human first and the robot second, with statistical modelling showing a strong main effect of relative animacy. The following experiment attempts to explore the ways in which animacy is affected by perceived mind. In doing so, we question the extent to which mind attribution determines animacy and designates an object’s place on the “animacy hierarchy”. Researchers in psycholinguistics have offered a few explanations for the animacy bias phenomenon. According to the theory of conceptual accessibility, the more significant an object is in human thought, the more conceptually accessible it is considered to be, and therefore the greater the likelihood of a speaker mentioning that object earlier on in speech (McDonald, Bock & Kelly, 1993; Bock & Warren 1985). Animate entities are also considered to be more easily or rapidly lexically retrieved, meaning the speed with which we retrieve labels for animate objects from memory is faster than that for inanimate objects and concepts, thus increasing the likelihood of these labels appearing earlier in speech (Branigan, Pickering & Tanaka, 2008). Regarding the specific animacy differences in our own study (human vs robot), we might look to neuroimaging studies to understand how human and robot figures are processed differently neurologically. When Wang and Quadflieg (2015) compared participants’ responses to interactions between either two humans or between a human and a robot, they identified that different regions of a neural network involved in formulating impressions relating to beliefs, desires, motives, feelings or intentions were activated depending on the interaction type (human/human or human/robot). The results from this study suggest that social cognition relating to impression formation may differ when we are witnessing interactions between two figures of the same relative animacy, and two figures who fall on different positions on the animacy hierarchy. Crucially, humans and robots also differ in agency and experience. While “agency” designates the thematic role of an object doing something to another object in linguistics (Dowty (1979, 1991), in the study of mind perception, agency has been defined as an object’s ability to plan and act (Gray, Gray, & Wegner, 2007). Experience, a second important feature of perceived mind, refers to an object’s ability to sense and feel (Gray et al., 2007). Evidence for humans and robots differing in perceived mind comes from Henschel, Bargel and Cross (2020), who asked participants to rate humans, robots and objects for capacities of mind. They found that participants rated humans as high for both features and ascribed robots with some agency but no experience (while objects had the lowest ratings for both agency and experience). The current study therefore considers two definitions of “agency” - firstly who, linguistically, is designated the sentence agent, and secondly who appears to the speaker as being the most agentive figure. An important cognitive feature of perceiving social interactions is intention, which relates to both the representation of a figure’s covert mental state and that which arises from perceiving an action they are carrying out (Gobbini et al., 2007). In addition to Gray, Gray and Wegner’s definition of agency, Dowty (1991) also proposes features of intentionality as key facets of agenthood, such as causation (causing another object to experience an event or change in state) and volition (choosing to be involved the event or state change). In general, we understand that humans have the capacity to plan and act – an ability that is certainly more questionable in robots, and we are also aware that humans are able to execute actions and bring about change. Again, this is an ability many people are likely to be uncertain about for robots. Thus, we could argue that people might perceive intention differently between human and robot figures executing actions. Social cognition is dependent on a person’s ability or willingness to consider the mind of another person. Dehumanised perception results when someone fails to engage typical social cognition and automatically consider the mind of another person (Harris & Fiske, 2011). On the other side of the spectrum is empathy – the capacity to understand and share another’s feelings. Empathy is an important feature of mind attribution while processing social interactions, and is something we are capable of demonstrating for robots as well as humans, given the right circumstances (Küster & Swiderska, 2020, Rosenthal-von der Pütten et al., 2013). The current study explores the role that mind attribution has on perceptions of animacy. We are investigating if it is possible to use narrative to alter how people perceive the mind of a non-human object, such as a robot, to the extent that they reverse the normal rules of the animacy bias (human mentioned first, robot mentioned second, as seen in Study 1). We will also use this narrative to reduce the perceived mind of human figures. In doing so, we aim to encourage speakers to view events from the perspective of the usually less-animate robot, therefore making this figure the sentence agent over the depicted human and mentioning it first in their descriptions of events. We will use the same paradigm as in Study 1, but we will manipulate features of mind, including agency, experience, empathy and dehumanisation, by prefacing the critical trials with a short story. In a robot-oriented condition, this narrative will frame the robot figures as highly animate and the human figures as dehumanised clones grown by the robot figures. A second and control condition, human-oriented, will depict the human figures as animate agents and the robots as clones the humans have grown. We will also use this control condition to measure the extent to which linguistic accessibility influenced the human bias detected in Study 1. There, we used common Anglophone names for our human figures (e.g. Fred, Kate) and fictional names for our robot figures (e.g. Cybe, Mech). In the current study, both human and robot figures will have fictional names, which would allow us to confirm that the results of Study 1 could not be explained simply in terms of name familiarity. Participants will view scenes of two figures interacting, who will differ in animacy (one robot and one human) and will describe these scenes using so-called symmetrical predicates (Gleitman, Gleitman, Miller, & Ostrin, 1996). These are verbs that imply a symmetry of action between the two figures (e.g. arguing, kissing, playing), but when used in a sentence they require the speaker to make a decision as to which figure should be mentioned first. Participants will form transitive sentences (e.g. “botz is arguing with kote”) to describe the events, which they will type into a text box, and we will measure if they mention the robot or the human first.