title: Investigating the ability to read others' intentions using humanoid robots.
abstract: The ability to interact with other people hinges crucially on the possibility to anticipate how their actions would unfold. Recent evidence suggests that a similar skill may be grounded on the fact that we perform an action differently if different intentions lead it. Human observers can detect these differences and use them to predict the purpose leading the action. Although intention reading from movement observation is receiving a growing interest in research, the currently applied experimental paradigms have important limitations. Here, we describe a new approach to study intention understanding that takes advantage of robots, and especially of humanoid robots. We posit that this choice may overcome the drawbacks of previous methods, by guaranteeing the ideal trade-off between controllability and naturalness of the interactive scenario. Robots indeed can establish an interaction in a controlled manner, while sharing the same action space and exhibiting contingent behaviors. To conclude, we discuss the advantages of this research strategy and the aspects to be taken in consideration when attempting to define which human (and robot) motion features allow for intention reading during social interactive tasks.
authors.affiliation: Departments of Robotics, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia Genoa, Italy.
authors.forename: Alessandra
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Sciutti
authors.affiliation: Departments of Robotics, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia Genoa, Italy.
authors.forename: Caterina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Ansuini
authors.affiliation: Departments of Robotics, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia Genoa, Italy ; Department of Psychology, Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Torino Torino, Italy.
authors.forename: Cristina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Becchio
authors.affiliation: Departments of Robotics, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia Genoa, Italy.
authors.forename: Giulio
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Sandini
keywords: contingency; human–robot interaction; intention reading; kinematics; motor cognition; second-person interaction