Neural foundations of cooperative social interactions

The embodied-embedded-enactive-extended (4E) approach to study cognition suggests that interaction with the world is a crucial component of our cognitive processes. Most of our time, we interact with other people. Therefore, studying cognition without interaction is incomplete. Until recently, social neuroscience has only focused on studying isolated human and animal brains, leaving interaction unexplored. To fill this gap, we studied interacting participants, focusing on both intra- and inter-brain (hyperscanning) neural activity. In the first study, we invited dyads to perform a visual task in both a cooperative and a competitive context while we measured EEG. We found that mid-frontal activity around 200-300 ms after receiving monetary rewards was sensitive to social context and differed between cooperative and competitive situations. In the second study, we asked participants to coordinate their movements with each other and with a robotic partner. We found significantly stronger EEG amplitudes at frontocentral electrodes when people interacted with a robotic partner. Lastly, we performed a comprehensive literature review and the first meta-analysis in the emerging field of hyperscanning that validated it as a method to study social interaction. Taken together, our results showed that adding a second participant (human or AI/robotic) fostered our understanding of human cognition. We learned that the activity at frontocentral electrodes is sensitive to social context and type of partner (human or robotic). In both studies, the participants’ interaction was required to show these novel neural processes involved in action monitoring. Similarly, studying inter-brain neural activity allows for the exploration of new aspects of cognition. Many cognitive functions involved in successful social interactions are accompanied by neural synchrony between brains, suggesting the extended form of our cognition

New approaches to the emerging social neuroscience of human-robot interaction

Prehistoric art, like the Venus of Willendorf sculpture, shows that we have always looked for ways to distil fundamental human characteristics and capture them in physically embodied representations of the self. Recently, this undertaking has gained new momentum through the introduction of robots that resemble humans in their shape and their behaviour. These social robots are envisioned to take on important roles: alleviate loneliness, support vulnerable children and serve as helpful companions for the elderly. However, to date, few commercially available social robots are living up to these expectations. Given their importance for an ever older and more socially isolated society, rigorous research at the intersection of psychology, social neuroscience and human-robot interaction is needed to determine to which extent mechanisms active during human-human interaction can be co-opted when we encounter social robots. This thesis takes an anthropocentric approach to answering the question how socially motivated we are to interact with humanoid robots. Across three empirical and one theoretical chapter, I use self-report, behavioural and neural measures relevant to the study of interactions with robots to address this question. With the Social Motivation Theory of Autism as a point of departure, the first empirical chapter (Chapter 3) investigates the relevance of interpersonal synchrony for human-robot interaction. This chapter reports a null effect: participants did not find a robot that synchronised its movement with them on a drawing task more likeable, nor were they more motivated to ask it more questions in a semi-structured interaction scenario. As this chapter heavily relies on self-report as a main outcome measure, Chapter 4 addresses this limitation by adapting an established behavioural paradigm for the study of human-robot interaction. This chapter shows that a failure to conceptually extend an effect in the field of social attentional capture calls for a different approach when seeking to adapt paradigms for HRI. Chapter 5 serves as a moment of reflection on the current state-of-the-art research at the intersection of neuroscience and human-robot interaction. Here, I argue that the future of HRI research will rely on interaction studies with mobile brain imaging systems (like functional near-infrared spectroscopy) that allow data collection during embodied encounters with social robots. However, going forward, the field should slowly and carefully move outside of the lab and into real situations with robots. As the previous chapters have established, well-known effects have to be replicated before they are implemented for robots, and before they are taken out of the lab, into real life. The final empirical chapter (Chapter 6), takes the first step of this proposed slow approach: in addition to establishing the detection rate of a mobile fNIRS system in comparison to fMRI, this chapter contributes a novel way to digitising optode positions by means of photogrammetry. In the final chapter of this thesis, I highlight the main lessons learned conducting studies with social robots. I propose an updated roadmap which takes into account the problems raised in this thesis and emphasise the importance of incorporating more open science practices going forward. Various tools that emerged out of the open science movement will be invaluable for researchers working on this exciting, interdisciplinary endeavour

Emergent coordination between humans and robots

Emergent coordination or movement synchronization is an often observed phenomenon in human behavior. Humans synchronize their gait when walking next to each other, they synchronize their postural sway when standing closely, and they also synchronize their movement behavior in many other situations of daily life. Why humans are doing this is an important question of ongoing research in many disciplines: apparently movement synchronization plays a role in children’s development and learning; it is related to our social and emotional behavior in interaction with others; it is an underlying principle in the organization of communication by means of language and gesture; and finally, models explaining movement synchronization between two individuals can also be extended to group behavior. Overall, one can say that movement synchronization is an important principle of human interaction behavior. Besides interacting with other humans, in recent years humans do more and more interact with technology. This was first expressed in the interaction with machines in industrial settings, was taken further to human-computer interaction and is now facing a new challenge: the interaction with active and autonomous machines, the interaction with robots. If the vision of today’s robot developers comes true, in the near future robots will be fully integrated not only in our workplace, but also in our private lives. They are supposed to support humans in activities of daily living and even care for them. These circumstances however require the development of interactional principles which the robot can apply to the direct interaction with humans. In this dissertation the problem of robots entering the human society will be outlined and the need for the exploration of human interaction principles that are transferable to human-robot interaction will be emphasized. Furthermore, an overview on human movement synchronization as a very important phenomenon in human interaction will be given, ranging from neural correlates to social behavior. The argument of this dissertation is that human movement synchronization is a simple but striking human interaction principle that can be applied in human-robot interaction to support human activity of daily living, demonstrated on the example of pick-and-place tasks. This argument is based on five publications. In the first publication, human movement synchronization is explored in goal-directed tasks which bare similar requirements as pick-and-place tasks in activities of daily living. In order to explore if a merely repetitive action of the robot is sufficient to encourage human movement synchronization, the second publication reports a human-robot interaction study in which a human interacts with a non-adaptive robot. Here however, movement synchronization between human and robot does not emerge, which underlines the need for adaptive mechanisms. Therefore, in the third publication, human adaptive behavior in goal-directed movement synchronization is explored. In order to make the findings from the previous studies applicable to human-robot interaction, in the fourth publication the development of an interaction model based on dynamical systems theory is outlined which is ready for implementation on a robotic platform. Following this, a brief overview on a first human-robot interaction study based on the developed interaction model is provided. The last publication describes an extension of the previous approach which also includes the human tendency to make use of events to adapt their movements to. Here, also a first human-robot interaction study is reported which confirms the applicability of the model. The dissertation concludes with a discussion on the presented findings in the light of human-robot interaction and psychological aspects of joint action research as well as the problem of mutual adaptation.Spontan auftretende Koordination oder Bewegungssynchronisierung ist ein häufig zu beobachtendes Phänomen im Verhalten von Menschen. Menschen synchronisieren ihre Schritte beim nebeneinander hergehen, sie synchronisieren die Schwingbewegung zum Ausgleich der Körperbalance wenn sie nahe beieinander stehen und sie synchronisieren ihr Bewegungsverhalten generell in vielen weiteren Handlungen des täglichen Lebens. Die Frage nach dem warum ist eine Frage mit der sich die Forschung in der Psychologie, Neuro- und Bewegungswissenschaft aber auch in der Sozialwissenschaft nach wie vor beschäftigt: offenbar spielt die Bewegungssynchronisierung eine Rolle in der kindlichen Entwicklung und beim Erlernen von Fähigkeiten und Verhaltensmustern; sie steht in direktem Bezug zu unserem sozialen Verhalten und unserer emotionalen Wahrnehmung in der Interaktion mit Anderen; sie ist ein grundlegendes Prinzip in der Organisation von Kommunikation durch Sprache oder Gesten; außerdem können Modelle, die Bewegungssynchronisierung zwischen zwei Individuen erklären, auch auf das Verhalten innerhalb von Gruppen ausgedehnt werden. Insgesamt kann man also sagen, dass Bewegungssynchronisierung ein wichtiges Prinzip im menschlichen Interaktionsverhalten darstellt. Neben der Interaktion mit anderen Menschen interagieren wir in den letzten Jahren auch zunehmend mit der uns umgebenden Technik. Hier fand zunächst die Interaktion mit Maschinen im industriellen Umfeld Beachtung, später die Mensch-Computer-Interaktion. Seit kurzem sind wir jedoch mit einer neuen Herausforderung konfrontiert: der Interaktion mit aktiven und autonomen Maschinen, Maschinen die sich bewegen und aktiv mit Menschen interagieren, mit Robotern. Sollte die Vision der heutigen Roboterentwickler Wirklichkeit werde, so werden Roboter in der nahen Zukunft nicht nur voll in unser Arbeitsumfeld integriert sein, sondern auch in unser privates Leben. Roboter sollen den Menschen in ihren täglichen Aktivitäten unterstützen und sich sogar um sie kümmern. Diese Umstände erfordern die Entwicklung von neuen Interaktionsprinzipien, welche Roboter in der direkten Koordination mit dem Menschen anwenden können. In dieser Dissertation wird zunächst das Problem umrissen, welches sich daraus ergibt, dass Roboter zunehmend Einzug in die menschliche Gesellschaft finden. Außerdem wird die Notwendigkeit der Untersuchung menschlicher Interaktionsprinzipien, die auf die Mensch-Roboter-Interaktion transferierbar sind, hervorgehoben. Die Argumentation der Dissertation ist, dass die menschliche Bewegungssynchronisierung ein einfaches aber bemerkenswertes menschliches Interaktionsprinzip ist, welches in der Mensch-Roboter-Interaktion angewendet werden kann um menschliche Aktivitäten des täglichen Lebens, z.B. Aufnahme-und-Ablege-Aufgaben (pick-and-place tasks), zu unterstützen. Diese Argumentation wird auf fünf Publikationen gestützt. In der ersten Publikation wird die menschliche Bewegungssynchronisierung in einer zielgerichteten Aufgabe untersucht, welche die gleichen Anforderungen erfüllt wie die Aufnahme- und Ablageaufgaben des täglichen Lebens. Um zu untersuchen ob eine rein repetitive Bewegung des Roboters ausreichend ist um den Menschen zur Etablierung von Bewegungssynchronisierung zu ermutigen, wird in der zweiten Publikation eine Mensch-Roboter-Interaktionsstudie vorgestellt in welcher ein Mensch mit einem nicht-adaptiven Roboter interagiert. In dieser Studie wird jedoch keine Bewegungssynchronisierung zwischen Mensch und Roboter etabliert, was die Notwendigkeit von adaptiven Mechanismen unterstreicht. Daher wird in der dritten Publikation menschliches Adaptationsverhalten in der Bewegungssynchronisierung in zielgerichteten Aufgaben untersucht. Um die so gefundenen Mechanismen für die Mensch-Roboter Interaktion nutzbar zu machen, wird in der vierten Publikation die Entwicklung eines Interaktionsmodells basierend auf Dynamischer Systemtheorie behandelt. Dieses Modell kann direkt in eine Roboterplattform implementiert werden. Anschließend wird kurz auf eine erste Studie zur Mensch- Roboter Interaktion basierend auf dem entwickelten Modell eingegangen. Die letzte Publikation beschreibt eine Weiterentwicklung des bisherigen Vorgehens welche der Tendenz im menschlichen Verhalten Rechnung trägt, die Bewegungen an Ereignissen auszurichten. Hier wird außerdem eine erste Mensch-Roboter- Interaktionsstudie vorgestellt, die die Anwendbarkeit des Modells bestätigt. Die Dissertation wird mit einer Diskussion der präsentierten Ergebnisse im Kontext der Mensch-Roboter-Interaktion und psychologischer Aspekte der Interaktionsforschung sowie der Problematik von beiderseitiger Adaptivität abgeschlossen

Enhanced Living Environments

This open access book was prepared as a Final Publication of the COST Action IC1303 “Algorithms, Architectures and Platforms for Enhanced Living Environments (AAPELE)”. The concept of Enhanced Living Environments (ELE) refers to the area of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) that is more related with Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Effective ELE solutions require appropriate ICT algorithms, architectures, platforms, and systems, having in view the advance of science and technology in this area and the development of new and innovative solutions that can provide improvements in the quality of life for people in their homes and can reduce the financial burden on the budgets of the healthcare providers. The aim of this book is to become a state-of-the-art reference, discussing progress made, as well as prompting future directions on theories, practices, standards, and strategies related to the ELE area. The book contains 12 chapters and can serve as a valuable reference for undergraduate students, post-graduate students, educators, faculty members, researchers, engineers, medical doctors, healthcare organizations, insurance companies, and research strategists working in this area

Lovotics: Love + Robotics, Sentimental Robot With Affective Artificial Intelligence

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Emergent coordination between humans and robots

Emergent coordination or movement synchronization is an often observed phenomenon in human behavior. Humans synchronize their gait when walking next to each other, they synchronize their postural sway when standing closely, and they also synchronize their movement behavior in many other situations of daily life. Why humans are doing this is an important question of ongoing research in many disciplines: apparently movement synchronization plays a role in children’s development and learning; it is related to our social and emotional behavior in interaction with others; it is an underlying principle in the organization of communication by means of language and gesture; and finally, models explaining movement synchronization between two individuals can also be extended to group behavior. Overall, one can say that movement synchronization is an important principle of human interaction behavior. Besides interacting with other humans, in recent years humans do more and more interact with technology. This was first expressed in the interaction with machines in industrial settings, was taken further to human-computer interaction and is now facing a new challenge: the interaction with active and autonomous machines, the interaction with robots. If the vision of today’s robot developers comes true, in the near future robots will be fully integrated not only in our workplace, but also in our private lives. They are supposed to support humans in activities of daily living and even care for them. These circumstances however require the development of interactional principles which the robot can apply to the direct interaction with humans. In this dissertation the problem of robots entering the human society will be outlined and the need for the exploration of human interaction principles that are transferable to human-robot interaction will be emphasized. Furthermore, an overview on human movement synchronization as a very important phenomenon in human interaction will be given, ranging from neural correlates to social behavior. The argument of this dissertation is that human movement synchronization is a simple but striking human interaction principle that can be applied in human-robot interaction to support human activity of daily living, demonstrated on the example of pick-and-place tasks. This argument is based on five publications. In the first publication, human movement synchronization is explored in goal-directed tasks which bare similar requirements as pick-and-place tasks in activities of daily living. In order to explore if a merely repetitive action of the robot is sufficient to encourage human movement synchronization, the second publication reports a human-robot interaction study in which a human interacts with a non-adaptive robot. Here however, movement synchronization between human and robot does not emerge, which underlines the need for adaptive mechanisms. Therefore, in the third publication, human adaptive behavior in goal-directed movement synchronization is explored. In order to make the findings from the previous studies applicable to human-robot interaction, in the fourth publication the development of an interaction model based on dynamical systems theory is outlined which is ready for implementation on a robotic platform. Following this, a brief overview on a first human-robot interaction study based on the developed interaction model is provided. The last publication describes an extension of the previous approach which also includes the human tendency to make use of events to adapt their movements to. Here, also a first human-robot interaction study is reported which confirms the applicability of the model. The dissertation concludes with a discussion on the presented findings in the light of human-robot interaction and psychological aspects of joint action research as well as the problem of mutual adaptation.Spontan auftretende Koordination oder Bewegungssynchronisierung ist ein häufig zu beobachtendes Phänomen im Verhalten von Menschen. Menschen synchronisieren ihre Schritte beim nebeneinander hergehen, sie synchronisieren die Schwingbewegung zum Ausgleich der Körperbalance wenn sie nahe beieinander stehen und sie synchronisieren ihr Bewegungsverhalten generell in vielen weiteren Handlungen des täglichen Lebens. Die Frage nach dem warum ist eine Frage mit der sich die Forschung in der Psychologie, Neuro- und Bewegungswissenschaft aber auch in der Sozialwissenschaft nach wie vor beschäftigt: offenbar spielt die Bewegungssynchronisierung eine Rolle in der kindlichen Entwicklung und beim Erlernen von Fähigkeiten und Verhaltensmustern; sie steht in direktem Bezug zu unserem sozialen Verhalten und unserer emotionalen Wahrnehmung in der Interaktion mit Anderen; sie ist ein grundlegendes Prinzip in der Organisation von Kommunikation durch Sprache oder Gesten; außerdem können Modelle, die Bewegungssynchronisierung zwischen zwei Individuen erklären, auch auf das Verhalten innerhalb von Gruppen ausgedehnt werden. Insgesamt kann man also sagen, dass Bewegungssynchronisierung ein wichtiges Prinzip im menschlichen Interaktionsverhalten darstellt. Neben der Interaktion mit anderen Menschen interagieren wir in den letzten Jahren auch zunehmend mit der uns umgebenden Technik. Hier fand zunächst die Interaktion mit Maschinen im industriellen Umfeld Beachtung, später die Mensch-Computer-Interaktion. Seit kurzem sind wir jedoch mit einer neuen Herausforderung konfrontiert: der Interaktion mit aktiven und autonomen Maschinen, Maschinen die sich bewegen und aktiv mit Menschen interagieren, mit Robotern. Sollte die Vision der heutigen Roboterentwickler Wirklichkeit werde, so werden Roboter in der nahen Zukunft nicht nur voll in unser Arbeitsumfeld integriert sein, sondern auch in unser privates Leben. Roboter sollen den Menschen in ihren täglichen Aktivitäten unterstützen und sich sogar um sie kümmern. Diese Umstände erfordern die Entwicklung von neuen Interaktionsprinzipien, welche Roboter in der direkten Koordination mit dem Menschen anwenden können. In dieser Dissertation wird zunächst das Problem umrissen, welches sich daraus ergibt, dass Roboter zunehmend Einzug in die menschliche Gesellschaft finden. Außerdem wird die Notwendigkeit der Untersuchung menschlicher Interaktionsprinzipien, die auf die Mensch-Roboter-Interaktion transferierbar sind, hervorgehoben. Die Argumentation der Dissertation ist, dass die menschliche Bewegungssynchronisierung ein einfaches aber bemerkenswertes menschliches Interaktionsprinzip ist, welches in der Mensch-Roboter-Interaktion angewendet werden kann um menschliche Aktivitäten des täglichen Lebens, z.B. Aufnahme-und-Ablege-Aufgaben (pick-and-place tasks), zu unterstützen. Diese Argumentation wird auf fünf Publikationen gestützt. In der ersten Publikation wird die menschliche Bewegungssynchronisierung in einer zielgerichteten Aufgabe untersucht, welche die gleichen Anforderungen erfüllt wie die Aufnahme- und Ablageaufgaben des täglichen Lebens. Um zu untersuchen ob eine rein repetitive Bewegung des Roboters ausreichend ist um den Menschen zur Etablierung von Bewegungssynchronisierung zu ermutigen, wird in der zweiten Publikation eine Mensch-Roboter-Interaktionsstudie vorgestellt in welcher ein Mensch mit einem nicht-adaptiven Roboter interagiert. In dieser Studie wird jedoch keine Bewegungssynchronisierung zwischen Mensch und Roboter etabliert, was die Notwendigkeit von adaptiven Mechanismen unterstreicht. Daher wird in der dritten Publikation menschliches Adaptationsverhalten in der Bewegungssynchronisierung in zielgerichteten Aufgaben untersucht. Um die so gefundenen Mechanismen für die Mensch-Roboter Interaktion nutzbar zu machen, wird in der vierten Publikation die Entwicklung eines Interaktionsmodells basierend auf Dynamischer Systemtheorie behandelt. Dieses Modell kann direkt in eine Roboterplattform implementiert werden. Anschließend wird kurz auf eine erste Studie zur Mensch- Roboter Interaktion basierend auf dem entwickelten Modell eingegangen. Die letzte Publikation beschreibt eine Weiterentwicklung des bisherigen Vorgehens welche der Tendenz im menschlichen Verhalten Rechnung trägt, die Bewegungen an Ereignissen auszurichten. Hier wird außerdem eine erste Mensch-Roboter- Interaktionsstudie vorgestellt, die die Anwendbarkeit des Modells bestätigt. Die Dissertation wird mit einer Diskussion der präsentierten Ergebnisse im Kontext der Mensch-Roboter-Interaktion und psychologischer Aspekte der Interaktionsforschung sowie der Problematik von beiderseitiger Adaptivität abgeschlossen

Towards a Cognitive Architecture for Socially Adaptive Human-Robot Interaction

People have a natural predisposition to interact in an adaptive manner with others, by instinctively changing their actions, tones and speech according to the perceived needs of their peers. Moreover, we are not only capable of registering the affective and cognitive state of our partners, but over a prolonged period of interaction we also learn which behaviours are the most appropriate and well-suited for each one of them individually. This universal trait that we share regardless of our different personalities is referred to as social adaptation (adaptability). Humans are always capable of adapting to the others although our personalities may influence the speed and efficacy of the adaptation. This means that in our everyday lives we are accustomed to partake in complex and personalized interactions with our peers. Carrying this ability to personalize to human-robot interaction (HRI) is highly desirable since it would provide user-personalized interaction, a crucial element in many HRI scenarios - interactions with older adults, assistive or rehabilitative robotics, child-robot interaction (CRI), and many others. For a social robot to be able to recreate this same kind of rich, human-like interaction, it should be aware of our needs and affective states and be capable of continuously adapting its behaviour to them. Equipping a robot with these functionalities however is not a straightforward task. A robust approach for solving this is implementing a framework for the robot supporting social awareness and adaptation. In other words, the robot needs to be equipped with the basic cognitive functionalities, which would allow the robot to learn how to select the behaviours that would maximize the pleasantness of the interaction for its peers, while being guided by an internal motivation system that would provide autonomy to its decision-making process. The goal of this research was threefold: attempt to design a cognitive architecture supporting social HRI and implement it on a robotic platform; study how an adaptive framework of this kind would function when tested in HRI studies with users; and explore how including the element of adaptability and personalization in a cognitive framework would in reality affect the users - would it bring an additional richness to the human-robot interaction as hypothesized, or would it instead only add uncertainty and unpredictability that would not be accepted by the robot`s human peers? This thesis covers the work done on developing a cognitive framework for human-robot interaction; analyzes the various challenges of implementing the cognitive functionalities, porting the framework on several robotic platforms and testing potential validation scenarios; and finally presents the user studies performed with the robotic platforms of iCub and MiRo, focused on understanding how a cognitive framework behaves in a free-form HRI context and if humans can be aware and appreciate the adaptivity of the robot. In summary, this thesis had the task of approaching the complex field of cognitive HRI and attempt to shed some light on how cognition and adaptation develop from both the human and the robot side in an HRI scenario

Embodied Cognitive Science of Music. Modeling Experience and Behavior in Musical Contexts

Recently, the role of corporeal interaction has gained wide recognition within cognitive musicology. This thesis reviews evidence from different directions in music research supporting the importance of body-based processes for the understanding of music-related experience and behaviour. Stressing the synthetic focus of cognitive science, cognitive science of music is discussed as a modeling approach that takes these processes into account and may theoretically be embedded within the theory of dynamic systems. In particular, arguments are presented for the use of robotic devices as tools for the investigation of processes underlying human music-related capabilities (musical robotics)