Abstract
Rapid progress in the area of humanoid robots offers tremendous possibilities for investigating and improving social competences in people with social deficits, but remains yet unexplored in schizophrenia. In this study, we examined the influence of social feedbacks elicited by a humanoid robot on motor coordination during a human-robot interaction. Twenty-two schizophrenia patients and twenty-two matched healthy controls underwent a collaborative motor synchrony task with the iCub humanoid robot. Results revealed that positive social feedback had a facilitatory effect on motor coordination in the control participants compared to non-social positive feedback. This facilitatory effect was not present in schizophrenia patients, whose social-motor coordination was similarly impaired in social and non-social feedback conditions. Furthermore, patients’ cognitive flexibility impairment and antipsychotic dosing were negatively correlated with patients’ ability to synchronize hand movements with iCub. Overall, our findings reveal that patients have marked difficulties to exploit facial social cues elicited by a humanoid robot to modulate their motor coordination during human-robot interaction, partly accounted for by cognitive deficits and medication. This study opens new perspectives for comprehension of social deficits in this mental disorder.
Highlights
Rapid progress in the area of humanoid robots offers tremendous possibilities for investigating and improving social competences in people with social deficits, but remains yet unexplored in schizophrenia
We explored the effect of social feedback on motor coordination in schizophrenia during a collaborative task with a humanoid robot
Our objectives were: first, to explore if interpersonal motor coordination impairments already shown during interactions with a human partner[20,21] apply to interactions with a robot partner; second, to investigate social-motor coordination in schizophrenia by quantifying the effect of social feedback on motor coordination; and third, to clarify the factors underlying abnormal behaviors observed during the cooperation task
Summary
Rapid progress in the area of humanoid robots offers tremendous possibilities for investigating and improving social competences in people with social deficits, but remains yet unexplored in schizophrenia. We examined the influence of social feedbacks elicited by a humanoid robot on motor coordination during a human-robot interaction. Patients’ cognitive flexibility impairment and antipsychotic dosing were negatively correlated with patients’ ability to synchronize hand movements with iCub. Overall, our findings reveal that patients have marked difficulties to exploit facial social cues elicited by a humanoid robot to modulate their motor coordination during humanrobot interaction, partly accounted for by cognitive deficits and medication. We hypothesize that non-verbal social cues influence our ability to coordinate our movements with that of others, even in very simple motor imitation tasks. SAR can improve engagement and elicit novel social behaviors in ASD individuals, including in subjects who do not interact socially with human therapists[30,31] This line of research develops simple social interaction tasks in order to motivate and engage patients to interact socially with the robot. To our knowledge, human-robot interaction during a collaborative task has never been exploited to monitor and study social interactions in schizophrenia
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