Emilio Lobato

University of California, Merced | UCM · Department of Cognitive Science

Very little research has investigated whether believing in paranormal, conspiracy, and pseudoscientific claims are related, even though they share the property of having no epistemic warrant. The present study investigated the association between these categories of epistemically unwarranted beliefs. Results revealed moderate to strong positive cor...

Improving scientific literacy requires examining both what people believe about scientific issues and why they hold those beliefs. We examined how people justified their agreement with statements regarding evolution, climate change, genetically modified foods, and vaccinations. Participants rated their level of agreement with statements reflecting...

We review findings from the psychology of science that are relevant to understanding or explaining peoples’ tendencies to believe both scientific and pseudoscientific claims. We discuss relevant theoretical frameworks and empirical findings to support the proposal that pseudoscientific beliefs arise in much the same way as other scientific and non-...

Research shows that religious and nonreligious individuals have different standards of evidence for religious and scientific claims. Here, in a preregistered replication and extension of McPhetres and Zuckerman, participants read about an effect attributed to either a scientific or religious cause, then assessed how much evidence, in the form of su...

We conducted a preregistered exploratory survey to assess whether patterns of individual differences in political orientation, social dominance orientation (SDO), traditionalism, conspiracy ideation, or attitudes about science predict willingness to share different kinds of misinformation regarding the COVID-19 pandemic online. Analyses revealed tw...

In this chapter, the authors focus on cognitive architectures that are developed with the intent to explain human cognition. The authors first describe the mission of cybernetics and early cognitive architectures and recount the popular criticism that these perspectives fail to provide genuine explanations of cognition. Moving forward, the authors...

In this chapter, the authors focus on cognitive architectures that are developed with the intent to explain human cognition. The authors first describe the mission of cybernetics and early cognitive architectures and recount the popular criticism that these perspectives fail to provide genuine explanations of cognition. Moving forward, the authors...

We discuss an experiment investigating the influence of social cues expressed by a robot on human attributions of interpersonal characteristics towards a robot and assessments of its interaction behaviors. During a hallway navigation scenario, participants were exposed to varying expressions of proxemic behavior and gaze cues over repeated interact...

A better understanding of human mental states in social contexts holds the potential to pave the way for implementation of robotic systems capable of more natural and intuitive interaction. In working toward such a goal, this paper reports on a study examining human perception of social signals based on manipulated sets of social cues in a simulate...

Purpose: To determine the prevalence of traumatic brain injury in a college population and to investigate the presence of resulting academic consequences. Method: Participants were 1043 students, enrolled in lower- and upper-division courses in a metropolitan, public university in Florida and were recruited from seven courses. Students completed th...

We describe an experiment that examined mental state attributions as a function of manipulated response speed. Based upon dual-process theories of cognition, the purpose was to examine the degree to which rapid versus reflective judgment might alter these attributions. Participants were presented with a theory of mind task and instructed to either...

Human-robot interaction (HRI) research requires new techniques for understanding the social dynamics that occur at the interface between humans and robots. Prior work has focused on incorporating the social cues and social signals distinction from the field of social signal processing and complementing this with recent advances in understanding hum...

Understanding intentions is a complex social-cognitive task for humans, let alone machines. In this paper we discuss how the developing field of Social Signal Processing, and assessing social cues to interpret social signals, may help to develop a foundation for robotic social intelligence. We describe a taxonomy to further R&D in HRI and facilitat...

In this paper we suggest that differing approaches to the science of social cognition mirror the arguments between radical embodied and traditional approaches to cognition. We contrast the use in social cognition of theoretical inference and mental simulation mechanisms with approaches emphasizing a direct perception of others’ mental states. We bu...

As robots are increasingly deployed in settings requiring social interaction, research is needed to examine the social signals perceived by humans when robots display certain social cues. In this paper, we report a study designed to examine how humans interpret social cues exhibited by robots. We first provide a brief overview of perspectives from...

Robots are increasingly being introduced into task environments that require the ability to exhibit appropriate social functionality. The present study is an examination of how social cues conveyed by a robot, during a brief interaction, affect the perception of the robot as a socially present agent. Participants were exposed to one of three gaze c...

Human-robot interaction (HRI) research needs to leverage the theories and findings from multiple disciplines to inform subsequent empirical investigation and robot design. Utilizing evidence and suggestions from social cognitive and neurocognitive disciplines for human-human interaction, we propose an approach for conceptualizing HRI. Comparing HRI...

When children who are permanently disabled by traumatic brain injury (TBI) return to school, most are placed in mainstream classrooms and incorrectly presumed capable of resuming their education. Only one to two percent are classified as students with TBI, qualifying them for the services they need for their education. The failure to properly class...