Séminaire ayant lieu dans le cadre du Doctorat en informatique cognitive, en alliance avec le centre de recherche CRIA

Agnieszka WYKOWSKA

Jeudi le 6 octobre 2022

10h30

Vidéoconférence - zoom  : https://uqam.zoom.us/j/88481835073 

Titre : Do we attribute intentional agency to humanoid robots?

Résumé

When predicting and explaining behavior of other humans, we adopt the intentional stance, and refer to mental states in order to understand others’ actions. However, it is not clear whether and when we adopt the intentional stance also towards artificial agents, such as humanoid robots. This talk will provide an overview of research conducted in my lab which addresses this question. I will present a tool for measuring adoption of the intentional stance. The likelihood of adopting the intentional stance is coded in specific patterns of neural activity at rest. Interactive scenarios influence adoption of the intentional stance more than mere observation of subtle human-like characteristics of a robot’s behavior. Experiments using interactive joint action protocols with a humanoid robot to study vicarious and joint sense of agency show that the robots’ motor repertoire and our ability to represent its actions with our own sensorimotor repertoire influence vicarious sense of agency. Embedding a non-verbal adaptation of a “Turing test” In a human-robot joint action task showed that human-like variability in the robot’s simple button presses makes the robot pass the test. The talk will conclude with a discussion of the role of the intentional stance and sense of agency in other mechanisms of social cognition, and their implications in applied domains of social robotics in healthcare.

Biographie

Agnieszka Wykowska leads the unit “Social Cognition in Human-Robot Interaction” at the Italian Institute of Technology (Genoa, Italy). The research foci of Prof. Wykowska are interdisciplinary, bridging psychology, cognitive neuroscience, robotics and healthcare. She combines cognitive neuroscience methods with human-robot interaction to understand the human brain mechanisms in interaction with other humans and with robots. Her research is also dedicated to applications of social robotics to healthcare: her team develops robot-assisted training protocols to help children diagnosed with autism-spectrum disorder in improving social skills.