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Brain response to a humanoid robot in areas implicated in the perception of human emotional gestures.pdf (801.32 kB)

Brain response to a humanoid robot in areas implicated in the perception of human emotional gestures

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posted on 2014-08-22, 11:30 authored by Thierry Chaminade, Massimiliano ZeccaMassimiliano Zecca, Sarah-Jane Blakemore, Atsuo Takanishi, Chris D. Frith, Silvestro Micera, Paolo Dario, Giacomo Rizzolatti, Vittorio Gallese, Maria Alessandra Umilta
BACKGROUND: The humanoid robot WE4-RII was designed to express human emotions in order to improve human-robot interaction. We can read the emotions depicted in its gestures, yet might utilize different neural processes than those used for reading the emotions in human agents. METHODOLOGY: Here, fMRI was used to assess how brain areas activated by the perception of human basic emotions (facial expression of Anger, Joy, Disgust) and silent speech respond to a humanoid robot impersonating the same emotions, while participants were instructed to attend either to the emotion or to the motion depicted. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Increased responses to robot compared to human stimuli in the occipital and posterior temporal cortices suggest additional visual processing when perceiving a mechanical anthropomorphic agent. In contrast, activity in cortical areas endowed with mirror properties, like left Broca’s area for the perception of speech, and in the processing of emotions like the left anterior insula for the perception of disgust and the orbitofrontal cortex for the perception of anger, is reduced for robot stimuli, suggesting lesser resonance with the mechanical agent. Finally, instructions to explicitly attend to the emotion significantly increased response to robot, but not human facial expressions in the anterior part of the left inferior frontal gyrus, a neural marker of motor resonance. CONCLUSIONS: Motor resonance towards a humanoid robot, but not a human, display of facial emotion is increased when attention is directed towards judging emotions. SIGNIFICANCE: Artificial agents can be used to assess how factors like anthropomorphism affect neural response to the perception of human actions.

History

School

  • Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering

Published in

PLOS ONE

Volume

5

Issue

7

Pages

? - ? (12)

Citation

CHAMINADE, T. ... (et al.), 2010. Brain response to a humanoid robot in areas implicated in the perception of human emotional gestures. PLoS One, 5 (7), e11577.

Publisher

Public Library of Science (© the authors)

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

Publication date

2010

Notes

Originally issued by PLoS under a CC BY Licence (see: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

ISSN

1932-6203

eISSN

1932-6203

Language

  • en

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