Using robots to probe how people react to simple behaviours | Where I Work - Nature.com

Josie Glausiusz, freelance writer in Israel, summarizes, Neuroscientist Agnieszka Wykowska investigates how the human brain reacts to embodied artificial intelligence.

Agnieszka Wykowska, cognitive neuroscientist at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa.
Photo: Mattia Balsamini for Nature

As a cognitive neuroscientist, I’ve always been fascinated by the human brain. As the photograph shows, I work with robots — at the intersection of neuroscience and robotics. I’m interested in how the brain processes social signals from robots and humans.

Robotics researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa, where my lab is based, developed the iCub, depicted here, to support research in embodied artificial intelligence. That involves equipping software with a physical ‘body’ and exploring how that body fits into the real world. The iCub can move its eyes, head, arms, hands, waist and legs, and can ‘hear’ with sensors.We can also generate a behaviour in it, such as turning its head towards a stimulus.

For our research, we place a wired cap on a person’s head and measure how their brain responds to the robot. We use a robot rather than another human, because that makes it easier to keep emotional expressions, facial micro-movements and gaze direction constant across many trials...

A key question for us is what sort of feelings or thoughts robots evoke in people.
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Additional resources 
Nature 583, 652 (2020)
doi: 10.1038/d41586-020-02155-1 

Source: Nature.com