Program

The full-day workshop will be organized along three main perspectives of the study of human robot interaction:

1)The robot as model or the robotics perspective;
2)The robot as stimulus or the Neural bases of interaction perspective and
3)The robot as interaction partner, the result of the integration of the former two.

The first perspective addresses the question of how human infants acquire social cognitive abilities by means of constructive approaches.
From this perspective robots are used as a model to implement developmental mechanisms aiming, among other cognitive skills, to learn to communicate naturally with human caregivers. From the second perspective robots are used as displays of social cues to human subjects to investigate and quantify, for example, how humans perceive social signals such as gaze and gestures and whether robots can be accepted as social partners. The third perspective intends to develop robotic interaction partners based on the knowledge of human social cognition derived from the previous two approaches. The three approaches mutually facilitate the understanding of and the development of human social cognition.