Abdulaziz Abubshait

Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia | IIT · S4hri

Joint attention is a pivotal mechanism underlying human ability to interact with one another. The fundamental nature of joint attention in the context of social cognition has led researchers to develop tasks that address this mechanism and operationalize it in a laboratory setting, in the form of a gaze cueing paradigm. In the present study, we add...

Communicative gaze (e.g., mutual or averted) has been shown to affect attentional orienting. However, no study to date has clearly separated the neural basis of the pure social component that modulates attentional orienting in response to communicative gaze from other processes that might be a combination of attentional and social effects. We used...

Human cognitive processes need to deal with contradictory situational demands to avoid over-load. On the one hand, social interactions imply the demand for cooperation, which requires processing social signals, while the demand for selective attention requires suppression of social signals in certain contexts. Here, we imposed these two conflicting...

Communicative gaze (e.g., mutual or averted) has been shown to affect attentional orienting. However, no study to date has clearly separated the neural basis of the pure social component that modulates attentional orienting in response to communicative gaze from other processes that might be a combination of attentional and social effects. We used...

To combat the spread of the COVID-19 virus, countries enforced quarantines, physical and social restrictions on people. These restrictions left many feeling isolated and lonely due to prolonged quarantines and lockdowns. This raises questions about using robots as social support to alleviate these symptoms, while still complying with restrictions a...

To combat the spread of the COVID-19 virus, countries enforced quarantines, physical and social restrictions on people. These restrictions left many feeling isolated and lonely due to prolonged quarantines and lockdowns. This raises questions about using robots as social support to alleviate these symptoms, while still complying with restrictions a...

With the increasing use of social robots and automated machines in our daily lives, roboticists need to design robots that are suitable for human-robot collaboration. Prior work suggests that robots that are perceived to be intentional (i.e., are able to experience mental life capacities), can, in most cases, positively affect human-robot collabora...

When we read fiction, we encounter characters that interact in the story. As such, we encode that information and comprehend the stories. Prior studies suggest that this comprehension process is facilitated by taking the perspective of characters during reading. Thus, two questions of interest are whether people take the perspective of characters t...

As technological advances progress, we find ourselves in situations where we need to collaborate with artificial agents (e.g., robots, autonomous machines and virtual agents). For example, autonomous machines will be part of search and rescue missions, space exploration and decision aids during monitoring tasks (e.g., baggage-screening at the airpo...

Leading another person’s gaze to establish joint attention facilitates social interaction. Previously it was found that we look back at agents who engage in joint attention quicker than at agents who display this behaviour less frequently. This paper serves to fill in two remaining knowledge gaps. Firstly, we examined whether this looking-back beha...

Understanding others' nonverbal behavior is essential for social interaction, as it allows, among others, to infer mental states. Although gaze communication, a well-established nonverbal social behavior, has shown its importance in inferring others' mental states, not much is known about the effects of irrelevant gaze signals on cognitive conflict...

Understanding others’ nonverbal behavior is essential for social interaction, as it allows, among others, to infer mental states. While gaze communication, a well-established nonverbal social behavior, has shown its importance in inferring others’ mental states, not much is known about the effects of irrelevant gaze signals on cognitive conflict ma...

When humans interact with artificial agents, they adopt various stances towards them. On one side of the spectrum, people might adopt a mechanistic stance towards an agent and explain its behavior using its functional properties. On the other hand, people can adopt the intentional stance towards artificial agents and explain their behavior using me...

Social signals, such as changes in gaze direction, are essential cues to predict others’ mental states and behaviors (i.e., mentalizing). Studies show that humans can mentalize with nonhuman agents when they perceive a mind in them (i.e., mind perception). Robots that physically and/or behaviorally resemble humans likely trigger mind perception, wh...

Social agents rely on the ability to use feedback to learn and modify their behavior. The extent to which this happens in social contexts depends on motivational, cognitive and/or affective parameters. For instance, feedback-associated learning occurs at different rates when the outcome of an action (e.g., winning or losing in a gambling task) affe...

Gaze behavior is an important social signal between humans, as it communicates locations of interest. People typically orient their attention to where others look, as this informs about others’ intentions and future actions. Studies have shown that humans can engage in similar gaze behavior with robots, but presumably more so when they adopt the in...

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-021-00902-z

Social species rely on the ability to modulate feedback-monitoring in social contexts to adjust one's actions and obtain desired outcomes. When being awarded positive outcomes during a gambling task, feedback-monitoring is attenuated when strangers are rewarded, as less value is assigned to the awarded outcome. This difference in feedback-monitorin...

When humans interact with artificial agents, they adopt various stances towards them. On one side of the spectrum, people might adopt a mechanistic stance towards an agent and explain its behavior using its functional properties. On the other hand, people can adopt the intentional stance towards artificial agents and explain their behavior using me...

Leading another person’s gaze to establish joint attention facilitates social interaction. Previously it was found that we look back at agents who engage in joint attention frequently and more quickly than agents who display this behaviour less often. This paper serves to fill in two knowledge gaps on the topic. Firstly, we examine whether this loo...

Gaze behavior is an important social signal between humans as it communicates locations of interest. People typically orient their attention to where others look as this informs about others' intentions and future actions. Studies have shown that humans can engage in similar gaze behavior with robots but presumably more so when they adopt the inten...

Understanding and reacting to others' nonverbal social signals, such as changes in gaze direction (i.e., gaze cue), are essential for social interactions, as it is important for processes such as joint attention and mentalizing. Although attentional orienting in response to gaze cues has a strong reflexive component, accumulating evidence shows tha...

Attentional orienting to nonverbal social signals is an important social behavior that humans engage in. While prior work still debates if attentional orienting to others’ gaze is reflexive or volitional, studies suggest that it depends on the observer’s cognitive resources. Here, we illustrate that when humans exert increased mental effort when tr...

Gaze behavior is an important social signal between humans as it communicates locations of interest. People typically orient their attention to where others look, as this informs about others’ intentions and future actions. Studies have shown that humans can engage in similar gaze behavior with robots, but presumably more so when they adopt the int...

When we interact with others, we use nonverbal behavior such as changes in gaze direction to make inferences about what people think or what they want to do next – a process called mentalizing. Previous studies have shown that how we react to others’ gaze signals depends on how much “mind” we ascribe to the gazer, and that this process of mind perc...

In social interactions, we rely on non-verbal cues like gaze direction to understand the behaviour of others. How we react to these cues is determined by the degree to which we believe that they originate from an entity with a mind capable of having internal states and showing intentional behaviour, a process called mind perception . While prior wo...

With the rise of increasingly complex artificial intelligence (AI), there is a need to design new methods to monitor AI in a transparent, human-aware manner. Decades of research have demonstrated that people, who are not aware of the exact performance levels of automated algorithms, often experience a mismatch in expectations. Consequently, they wi...

In social interactions, we rely on nonverbal cues like gaze direction to understand the behavior of others. How we react to these cues is affected by whether they are believed to originate from an entity with a mind, capable of having internal states (i.e., mind perception). While prior work has established a set of neural regions linked to social-...

The Uncanny Valley (UV) hypothesis states that agents that look humanlike but are not perfectly human elicit feelings of eeriness in human observers, associated with negative ratings of mind, trust and likability. However, empirical evidence for the UV is sparse and individual dispositions are not considered to moderate the UV. The present study as...

Gaze following occurs automatically in social interactions, but the degree to which gaze is followed depends on whether an agent is perceived to have a mind, making its behavior socially more relevant for the interaction. Mind perception also modulates the attitudes we have towards others, and determines the degree of empathy, pro-sociality and mor...