Emotional Empathy as a Mechanism of Synchronisation in Child-Robot Interaction

Simulating emotional experience, emotional empathy is the fundamental ingredient of interpersonal communication. In the speaker-listener scenario, the speaker is always a child, the listener is a human or a toy robot. Two groups of neurotypical children aged 6 years on average composed the population: one Japanese (n = 20) and one French (n = 20). Revealing potential similarities in communicative exchanges in both groups when in contact with a human or a toy robot, the results might signify that emotional empathy requires the implication of an automatic identification. In this sense, emotional empathy might be considered a broad idiosyncrasy, a kind of synchronisation, offering the mind a peculiar form of communication. Our findings seem to be consistent with the assumption that children’s brains would be constructed to simulate the feelings of others in order to ensure interpersonal synchronisation

Artificial consciousness and the consciousness-attention dissociation

Artificial Intelligence is at a turning point, with a substantial increase in projects aiming to implement sophisticated forms of human intelligence in machines. This research attempts to model specific forms of intelligence through brute-force search heuristics and also reproduce features of human perception and cognition, including emotions. Such goals have implications for artificial consciousness, with some arguing that it will be achievable once we overcome short-term engineering challenges. We believe, however, that phenomenal consciousness cannot be implemented in machines. This becomes clear when considering emotions and examining the dissociation between consciousness and attention in humans. While we may be able to program ethical behavior based on rules and machine learning, we will never be able to reproduce emotions or empathy by programming such control systems—these will be merely simulations. Arguments in favor of this claim include considerations about evolution, the neuropsychological aspects of emotions, and the dissociation between attention and consciousness found in humans. Ultimately, we are far from achieving artificial consciousness

Ordered interpersonal synchronisation in ASD children via robots

Children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) experience persistent disrupted coordination in interpersonal synchronisation that is thought to be associated with deficits in neural connectivity. Robotic interventions have been explored for use with ASD children worldwide revealing that robots encourage one-to-one social and emotional interactions. However, associations between interpersonal synchronisation and emotional empathy have not yet been directly explored in French and Japanese ASD children when they interact with a human or a robot under analogous experimental conditions. Using the paradigm of actor-perceiver, where the child was the actor and the robot or the human the perceiver, we recorded the autonomic heart rate activation and reported emotional feelings of ASD children in both countries. Japanese and French ASD children showed different interpersonal synchronisation when they interacted with the human perceiver, even though the human was the same in both countries. However, they exhibited similar interpersonal synchronisation when the perceiver was the robot. The findings suggest that the mechanism combining interpersonal synchronisation and emotional empathy might be weakened but not absent in ASD children and that both French and Japanese ASD children do spontaneously and unconsciously discern non verbal actions of non human partners through a direct matching process that occurs via automatic mapping

Can You Activate Me? From Robots to Human Brain

L'efficacia dei robot sociali \ue8 stata ampiamente riconosciuta in diversi contesti della vita quotidiana degli umani, ma ancora poco si sa sulle aree cerebrali attivate osservando o interagendo con un robot. La ricerca che combina neuroscienze, scienze cognitive e robotica pu\uf2 fornire nuove intuizioni sia sul funzionamento del nostro cervello che sull'implementazione dei robot. Studi comportamentali sui robot sociali hanno dimostrato che la percezione sociale dei robot \ue8 influenzata da almeno due fattori: aspetto fisico e comportamento (Marchetti et al., 2018). Come possono le neuroscienze spiegare tali risultati? Ad oggi sono stati condotti studi attraverso l'utilizzo di tecniche sia EEG che fMRI per indagare le aree cerebrali coinvolte nell'interazione uomo-robot. Questi studi hanno affrontato principalmente le attivazioni cerebrali in risposta a paradigmi che coinvolgono o la performance di un'azione o la carica di una componente emotiva.The effectiveness of social robots has been widely recognized in different contexts of humans\u2019 daily life, but still little is known about the brain areas activated by observing or interacting with a robot. Research combining neuroscience, cognitive science and robotics can provide new insights into both the functioning of our brain and the implementation of robots. Behavioural studies on social robots have shown that the social perception of robots is influenced by at least two factors: physical appearance and behavior (Marchetti et al., 2018). How can neuroscience explain such findings? To date, studies have been conducted through the use of both EEG and fMRI techniques to investigate the brain areas involved in human-robot interaction. These studies have mainly addressed brain activations in response to paradigms involving either action performance or charged of an emotional component

Bridging the gap between emotion and joint action

Our daily human life is filled with a myriad of joint action moments, be it children playing, adults working together (i.e., team sports), or strangers navigating through a crowd. Joint action brings individuals (and embodiment of their emotions) together, in space and in time. Yet little is known about how individual emotions propagate through embodied presence in a group, and how joint action changes individual emotion. In fact, the multi-agent component is largely missing from neuroscience-based approaches to emotion, and reversely joint action research has not found a way yet to include emotion as one of the key parameters to model socio-motor interaction. In this review, we first identify the gap and then stockpile evidence showing strong entanglement between emotion and acting together from various branches of sciences. We propose an integrative approach to bridge the gap, highlight five research avenues to do so in behavioral neuroscience and digital sciences, and address some of the key challenges in the area faced by modern societies

Investigation of sequence processing: A cognitive and computational neuroscience perspective

Serial order processing or sequence processing underlies many human activities such as speech, language, skill learning, planning, problem-solving, etc. Investigating the neural bases of sequence processing enables us to understand serial order in cognition and also helps in building intelligent devices. In this article, we review various cognitive issues related to sequence processing with examples. Experimental results that give evidence for the involvement of various brain areas will be described. Finally, a theoretical approach based on statistical models and reinforcement learning paradigm is presented. These theoretical ideas are useful for studying sequence learning in a principled way. This article also suggests a two-way process diagram integrating experimentation (cognitive neuroscience) and theory/ computational modelling (computational neuroscience). This integrated framework is useful not only in the present study of serial order, but also for understanding many cognitive processes

Are women better mindreaders? Sex differences in neural correlates of mentalizing detected with functional MRI

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The ability to mentalize, i.e. develop a Theory of Mind (ToM), enables us to anticipate and build a model of the thoughts, emotions and intentions of others. It has long been hypothesised that women differ from men in their mentalizing abilities. In the present fMRI study we examined the impact of (1) gender (women vs. men) and (2) game partner (human vs. computer) on ToM associated neural activity in the medial prefrontal cortex. Groups of men (n = 12) and women (n = 12) interacted in an iterated classical prisoner's dilemma forced choice situation with alleged human and computer partners who were outside the scanner.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Both the conditions of playing against putative human as well as computer partners led to activity increases in mPFC, ACC and rTPJ, constituting the classic ToM network. However, mPFC/ACC activity was more pronounced when participants believed they were playing against the alleged human partner. Differences in the medial frontal lobe activation related to the sex of the participants could be demonstrated for the human partner > computer partner contrast.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our data demonstrate differences in medial prefrontal brain activation during a ToM task depending on both the gender of participants and the game partner.</p