Brain activity during reciprocal social interaction investigated using conversational robots as control condition

Abstract

One contribution of 17 to a theme issue 'From social brains to social robots: applying neurocognitive insights to human -robot interaction'.We present a novel functional magnetic resonance imaging paradigm for second-person neuroscience. The paradigm compares a human social interaction (human-human interaction, HHI) to an interaction with a conversational robot (human-robot interaction, HRI). The social interaction consists of 1 min blocks of live bidirectional discussion between the scanned participant and the human or robot agent. A final sample of 21 participants is included in the corpus comprising physiological (blood oxygen leveldependent, respiration and peripheral blood flow) and behavioural (recorded speech from all interlocutors, eye tracking from the scanned participant, face recording of the human and robot agents) data. Here, we present the first analysis of this corpus, contrasting neural activity between HHI and HRI. We hypothesized that independently of differences in behaviour between interactions with the human and robot agent, neural markers of mentalizing (temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and medial prefrontal cortex) and social motivation (hypothalamus and amygdala) would only be active in HHI. Results confirmed significantly increased response associated with HHI in the TPJ, hypothalamus and amygdala, but not in the medial prefrontal cortex. Future analysis of this corpus will include fine-grained characterization of verbal and non-verbal behaviours recorded during the interaction to investigate their neural correlates.This article is part of the theme issue 'From social brains to social robots: applying neurocognitive insights to human -robot interaction'.

Entropy and the Brain: An Overview

“…As a result, it was unclear whether the observed changes in entropy were due to the individuals’ interaction with the media or potentially a residue of overall brain signal variability [ 1 , 3 ] which may not necessarily pertain to the effect of stimuli. Most importantly, their results were inconsistent with the findings that pinpointed the substantial contrast between human–human and human–agent interactions (HHI and HAI, respectively) [ 210 , 211 , 212 , 213 ]. Therefore, future research to clarify these discrepancies is necessary to allow for robust interpretation of the potential change in brain signal variability in response to such stimuli as meditation [ 204 ] and mediated social communication [ 205 ].…”

From social brains to social robots: applying neurocognitive insights to human–robot interaction

“…This section begins with an elegant study by Rauchbauer et al [19], who combine functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with a real-time interaction paradigm wherein participants carried out a conversation (describing photographs) with either a human or robotic interaction partner. The authors aimed to develop a paradigm that maximized the ecological validity of the social interaction task when conversing with both the human and robotic interaction partner.…”

Comparative Analysis of the Permutation and Multiscale Entropies for Quantification of the Brain Signal Variability in Naturalistic Scenarios

“…Most importantly, these results were inconsistent with the findings that underlined the substantial contrast between human-human and human-agent interactions (HHI and HAI, respectively) [90]. For example, Rauchbauer and colleagues [91] observed that neural markers of mentalizing [92,93] and social motivation [94] were only activated during HHI. These studies also suggested that although the brain activity within the person perception network (PPN) was not reduced during HAI (as compared to HHI), the activity within the theory-of-mind (TOM) network [95,96] was reduced [97,98].…”