Abstract

In this paper, we propose that experimental protocols involving artificial agents, in particular the embodied humanoid robots, provide insightful information regarding social cognitive mechanisms in the human brain. Using artificial agents allows for manipulation and control of various parameters of behaviour, appearance and expressiveness in one of the interaction partners (the artificial agent), and for examining effect of these parameters on the other interaction partner (the human). At the same time, using artificial agents means introducing the presence of artificial, yet human-like, systems into the human social sphere. This allows for testing in a controlled, but ecologically valid, manner human fundamental mechanisms of social cognition both at the behavioural and at the neural level. This paper will review existing literature that reports studies in which artificial embodied agents have been used to study social cognition and will address the question of whether various mechanisms of social cognition (ranging from lower- to higher-order cognitive processes) are evoked by artificial agents to the same extent as by natural agents, humans in particular. Increasing the understanding of how behavioural and neural mechanisms of social cognition respond to artificial anthropomorphic agents provides empirical answers to the conundrum ‘What is a social agent?’

Highlights

  • Numerous cognitive mechanisms are involved in human social interactions, illustrating the high social competence of our species

  • We postulate that using artificial agents, in particular embodied real-size humanoid robots such as CB [2], to study human social cognition offers a perfect compromise between ecological validity and experimental control

  • We postulate that using artificial agents to examine social cognition offers a unique opportunity for combining a high degree of experimental control on the one hand, and ecological validity on the other

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Summary

Introduction

Numerous cognitive mechanisms are involved in human social interactions, illustrating the high social competence of our species. The challenge with using second-person perspective, is that the experimental protocols lose some of the experimental control offered by more traditional observational approaches In this context, we postulate that using artificial agents, in particular embodied real-size humanoid robots such as CB [2], to study human social cognition offers a perfect compromise between ecological validity and experimental control. Artificial agents allow for manipulation of various characteristics of appearance and/or behaviour and for examining what impact those manipulations have on the mechanisms of human social cognition [3] In support of this idea, Sciutti et al [4] argued that using humanoid robots is beneficial for examining how observers understand intentions from movement patterns of the observed agents thanks to the ‘modularity of the control’ [4, p. The paper will review several behavioural and neural mechanisms of social cognition examined with the use of artificial agents and humanoid robots in particular (figure 1).

Action–perception coupling
Intentional stance
Sensitivity to human-like behaviour
Conclusion
45. Chaminade T et al 2010 Brain response to a
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