Event overview
Emily S. Cross (Wales Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience) asks: if our brains are designed to watch human movement, what happens when we watch or interact with robots ?
As humans, we gather a wide range of information about other agents from watching them move. A network of brain regions has been implicated in understanding others' actions by means of an automatic matching process that links actions we see others perform with our own motor abilities.
Current views of this network assume a matching process biased towards familiar actions; specifically, those performed by conspecifics and present in the observer's motor repertoire. However, emerging work in the field of social neuroscience is raising some interesting challenges to this dominant theoretical perspective.
Specifically, recent work has questioned if this system is built for and biased towards familiar human actions, then what happens when we watch or interact with artificial agents, such as robots or avatars?
In addition, is it only the similarity between self and others that leads to engagement of brain regions that link action with perception, or do affective or aesthetic evaluations of another’s action also shape this process?
In this talk, I discuss several recent brain imaging and behavioural studies by my team that provide some first answers to these questions. Broadly speaking, our results challenge previous ideas about how we perceive social agents and suggest broader, more flexible processing of agents and actions we may encounter.
The implications of these findings are further considered in light of whether motor resonance with robotic agents may facilitate human-robot interaction in the future, and the extent to which motor resonance with performing artists shapes a spectator’s aesthetic experience of a dance or theatre piece.
Emily S. Cross is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Bangor’s School of Psychology.
She completed undergraduate studies in psychology and dance in California, followed by an MSc in cognitive psychology in New Zealand, and then a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at Dartmouth College in the USA. Following this, she completed postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Nottingham and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany.
The primary aim of her research is to explore experience-dependent plasticity in the human brain and behaviour using neuroimaging, neurostimulation and behavioural techniques.
As her research team is particularly interested in complex action learning and perception, they often call upon action experts and training paradigms from highly skilled motor domains, such as dance, music, gymnastics, contortion, and acrobatics.
She has a longstanding interest in aesthetic perception, and has performed a number of studies exploring the impact of affective experience on how we perceive others. More recently, as part of an ERC starting grant, she and her team are examining how social experience or expectations about artificial agents shape how we perceive and interact with robots and avatars.
About the Whitehead Lecture series
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 29 Nov 2017 | 4:00pm - 5:30pm |
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