Social Cognition for HRI: Exploring the Relationship between Mindreading and Social Attunement in Human-Robot Interaction

This workshop aims at bringing together various disciplines to address the relationship between mentalizing or adopting the intentional stance towards robots and social attunement in human-robot interaction. The question will be tackled from the empirical, theoretical, computational, and philosophical approaches as well as potential applications in clinical domains. We invite speakers from the areas of cognitive and social neuroscience, psychology, computational modeling, cognitive science, human-robot interaction, robotics, and philosophy of mind, who address the question of conditions and consequences of attributing mental states to robots. We will also discuss individual differences in attitudes regarding robots, including variability in the likelihood of adopting the intentional stance towards artificial agents. The concluding discussion will focus on how empirical results influence the implementation of behavior in robots, and which application contexts should promote robot design that elicits mentalizing. In the discussion, we will also address ethical aspects related to evoking socio-cognitive mechanisms (including mentalizing) towards robots.