Social cognition during human-robot interaction
Maki is interested in the role of our cultural background and affiliation for our perception and behaviour around our interaction with robots. A study is in progress to investigate our social behaviour around interpersonal space with a small humanoid robot while maximising both empirical robustness and ecological richness.
To explore the possibility of human-robot cooperation and the social meanings of artificial emotions, Te-Yi and Bish have developed human-robot economic games and investigated participants’ social decision-making process in such context.
One important factor in human-human interaction is the timing of movement and the experience of interpersonal synchrony. Anna conducted a study testing social motivation towards the robot Pepper after a joint synchrony game (Henschel & Cross, 2020) and is now looking at the effect of robotic faces on attention (Henschel, Bargel & Cross, in prep).
