Learning Outcomes
The goal of the seminar is to introduce students to contemporary approaches in social robotics, that is: how to design and evaluate robots that trigger humanlike social interaction patterns (e.g., displaying emotions, turn-taking), are intuitive to interact with and active brain areas that are also activated during human-human interactions. During the course, we will discuss the psychological and neurophysiological basics underlying social interactions (human-human and human-robot), with a focus on mind perception, mentalizing, action understanding, joint action and trust. The course also covers common application areas for social robots, such as health care, education and home assistance. The successful completion of this course will allow students to: 1) be able to evaluate publications in the field of human-robot interaction, 2) understand the main insights and challenges in human-robot interaction, 3) understand the most important social-cognitive and neurophysiological principles underlying social interactions, 4) be able to select appropriate measures and paradigms to examine human-robot interaction, 5) know effective principles to design artificially intelligent social agents, and 6) formulate their own research proposal for a potential study in the field of human-robot interaction.
