OBJECTIVE: Social robot interventions are being implemented to reduce cognitive decline, depression, and loneliness among older adults. However, the types, functions, and programs of effective social robots have not yet been confirmed. This study inv...
BACKGROUND: Social robotics is a research field aimed at providing robots with skills related to social behavior and natural human interaction. Many studies have demonstrated the efficacy of these robots as socio-communicative mediators. Others have ...
Interactions with social robots are guided by the pretense that robots depict real people. But they can also be that are direct, automatic, and independent of any thoughtful mapping between what is real and depicted. Both experiences are important,...
Clark and Fischer's dismissal of extant human-robot interaction research approaches limits opportunities to understand major variables shaping people's engagement with social robots. Instead, this endeavour categorically requires multidisciplinary ap...
Clark and Fischer's depiction hypothesis is based on examples of western mimetic art. Yet social robots do not depict social interactions, but instead perform them. Similarly, dance and performance art do not rely on depiction. Kinematics and express...
There are reasons to suspect that meta-cognition about construing social robots as depictions would be more difficult - or absent - than Clark and Fischer discuss. Self-reports about the cognitive processes involved might therefore tend to be incompl...
We question the role given to depiction in Clark and Fischer's account of interaction with social robots. Specifically, we argue that positing a unique cognitive process for handling depiction is evolutionarily implausible and empirically redundant b...
Clark and Fischer analyze social robots as depictions, presenting characters that people can interact with in social settings. Unlike other types of depictions, the props for social robot depictions depend on emerging interactive technologies. This ...
Following the depiction theory by Clark and Fischer we would expect people interacting with robots to experience emotions akin to those toward films or novels. However, some people's emotional reactions toward robots display the motivational force t...
Much research in robotic artificial intelligence (AI) and Artificial Life has focused on autonomous agents as an embodied and situated approach to AI. Such systems are commonly viewed as overcoming many of the philosophical problems associated with t...