Nadine Wirkuttis, Predictive Brains and Embodied Social Interaction: A Neurorobotics Approach

Speaker: Nadine Wirkuttis, Cognitive Neurorobotics (Tani) Unit

Title: Predictive Brains and Embodied Social Interaction: A Neurorobotics Approach

Abstract:  Many things we do or think involve other people. We strive to understand, predict, and coordinate our interactions with them. One open question for the social sciences is how individuals coordinate their behavior in dyadic contexts. Conducting synthetic neurorobotics experiments allows investigating underlying cognitive processes under controlled laboratory conditions. By using two humanoid robotics systems, we can systematically study mechanisms that guide the social dynamics in robot-robot interactions. Under the Bayesian brain hypothesis, which explains our cognitive abilities based on statistical principles, we analyze how the robotic agents infer (i.e. understand) and predict (i.e. form expectations about) each other. Consequently, we can go back to the conceptual resources about human social cognition and re-evaluate those.