Synthetic psychology — the mission to understand behavior through robotics | Software / Simulation - Robot Report

The field of psychology, particularly neuroscience, is constantly taking steps toward successfully being able to explain and model human behavior by Shuhan He, Author at The Robot Report. 

Tony Prescott is among the researchers developing models of human intelligence based on the synthetic psychology of robots.
Photo: University of Sheffield

That is the holy grail for everyone working in this field. “Synthetic psychology is the idea that we can understand ourselves by building physical models of ourselves, in the form of robots,” says Tony Prescott, a lead neuroscientist at the University of Sheffield in the U.K.

The first proponent of synthetic psychology was Italian-Austrian cyberneticist Valentino Braitenberg. In 1984, he put forward the theory that behavior can be observed by creating simple robots or “vehicles” that follow rules. For example, you could design a so-called vehicle that is programmed to detect the direction of the strongest light source and move in that direction.

Once the vehicle is programmed with its preset behaviors, you can insert it into any environment to see how it would behave. In this example, changing the strength and location of light sources would affect the vehicle’s movement. The vehicle exhibits the behavior of “moving toward the nearest light source” and is a very simple example of how we can use Braitenberg’s theory to explore human behavior via robotics...

Synthetic psychology, AI, and the future 
Robots that replicate animal behavior are very useful in learning more about human behavior, especially if the animal in question shares large amounts of its brain structure with humans.

Robotics and related fields are often scrutinized with the school of thought that too much AI is going to have a negative impact on humans. Will robots take our jobs or cause other problems for us?
Read more...

Source: Robot Report