HDR Thierry Chaminade

Friday 30 June at 14:00, ZOOM

Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR)

Thierry Chaminade

Neural Bases of Human Social Cognition investigated with Human-Robot Interactions

Summary: This thesis investigates the neural bases of human social cognition through interactions with humanoid robots. The thesis introduces the field of social cognitive neuroscience, and describes how humanoid robots, embodied mechanical agents that resemble the human body, can be used to investigate human cognition. I will describe how artificial agents already provided unique opportunities to cognitive and neural mechanisms of human social cognition, in relation to motor or emotional resonance or mentalizing. The end of the thesis focuses on a new scientific approach based on a direct comparison of human-human and human-robot natural conversations. This approach allows us to investigate the physiological bases of natural social interactions that are pertinent for second-person social neuroscience. Overall, this thesis highlights the importance of understanding human reactions towards these agents and their social competence in relation to their anthropomorphism (perceptual processes) as well as the naïve human belief about their autonomous stature (contextual effects).