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Join us for the John Patrick Crecine Distinguished Lecture in Arts and Sciences featuring Agnieszka Wykowska, Principal Investigator, Italian Institute of Technology.
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Lecture title: Social cognition in human-robot interaction
Abstract:
In daily lives, we need to be able to efficiently navigate through our social environment. Our brain has developed a plethora of mechanisms that allow smooth social interactions with others, and that enable understanding of others’ behaviors, and prediction of what others are going to do next. At the dawn of a new era, in which robots might soon be among us at homes and offices, one needs to ask whether (or when) our brain uses similar mechanisms towards robots. In our research, we examine what factors in human-robot interaction lead to activation of mechanisms of social cognition. We use methods of cognitive neuroscience and experimental psychology in naturalistic protocols in which humans interact with the humanoid robot iCub. Here, I will present results of several experiments in which we examined the impact of various parameters of robot social behavior on the mechanisms of social cognition. We examined whether mutual gaze, gaze-contingent robot behavior, or human-likeness of movements influence engagement of mechanisms of social cognition. Our results show an interesting interaction between more “social” aspects of robot behavior and fundamental processes of human cognition. The results will be discussed in the context of several general questions that need to be addressed: the societal impact of robots towards whom we attune socially or clinical applications of social robots.
About the speaker:
Professor Agnieszka Wykowska leads the unit “Social Cognition in Human-Robot Interaction” at the Italian Institute of Technology (Genoa, Italy) and is also affiliated with the Luleå University of Technology, Sweden, as adjunct professor in engineering psychology. In 2016 she was awarded the ERC Starting Grant “Intentional stance for social attunement”. Prof. Wykowska studied neuro-cognitive psychology (Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich) and philosophy (Jagiellonian University, Krakow). She obtained PhD in psychology and the German “Habilitation” from the Ludwig Maximilian University. She is Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Social Robotics and an Associate Editor of Frontiers in Psychology (section Cognition). She has been serving as Program Committee member for the conferences: “International Conference on Social Robotics”, “Human-Robot Interaction”, “Advanced Robotics and its Social Impacts”. In 2013, she received an Early Stage Career Prize at the COST meeting “The future concept and reality of social robotics: challenges, perception and applications – role of social robotics in current and future society”. In 2018 she participated in a meeting at the European Parliament “Investing in young researchers, shaping Europe’s future”, organised jointly by STOA (European Parliament’s Science and Technology Options Assessment Panel) and the ERC. In her research, she examines how humans respond to humanoid robots, and how to make robots’ behaviour comprehensible for humans. Apart from contribution to social cognitive neuroscience, her research can inform the development of artificial intelligence for social robotics, and the design of robots for societal needs (healthcare, elderly care and daily assistance).
Distinguished lectures in social sciences are named in honor of John Patrick Crecine, dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University from 1976 to 1983.