*2.1. Participants and Trial Design*

All participants gave their informed consent for inclusion before they participated in the study. The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and the protocol was approved by the School of Engineering, University of Birmingham Ethics process. 23 participants (mean age: 25; 19 male, six female). Participants had no prior experience of the equipment or experimental tasks, and received minimal prior instruction as the aim was to see how they would respond on their first encounter with the objects. They were told that the aim of the trials was to allow them to interact with 'animate objects' and that they were to perform an action that they believed would be appropriate on an object as soon as they were confident in the opportunity to act. All participants performed three trials, with each trial involving 6–8 repetitions. In total, this produced 650 records, and 7<sup>1</sup> 2 hours of video.

The timings, for the first two trials, were taken from the data recorded from the sensors on objects (FSR and tilt switch). This gave a resolution of 1 ms. Timings for trial 3 were taken from video data. To ensure timings were consistent for all participants, video analysis was performed by two people independently, and were tested to be within 20% tolerance, otherwise the video analysis was repeated. To ensure consistency of video capture, the camera was situated in the same position throughout the

whole experiment and was not in the field of view of the participant in order to provide minimal disruption. In this experiment, the independent variables were lights, sounds and the dependent variables were time (pick up jug, spoon, pour, open drawer) and number of mistakes.
