Davide De Tommaso's research while affiliated with Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia and other places
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Publications (62)
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...
Being surrounded by others has enabled humans to optimize everyday life tasks, as the mere presence of others can improve performance in some daily tasks. At the same time, the presence of an audience can also be detrimental to an individual's performance. Still, it is unclear what happens when these “others” include artificial agents, such as robo...
The concept of scaffolding refers to the support that the environment provides in the acquisition and consolidation of new abilities. Technological advancements allow for support in the acquisition of cognitive capabilities, such as second language acquisition using simple smartphone applications There is, however, one domain of cognition that has...
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...
The concept of scaffolding refers to the support that the environment provides in the acquisition and consolidation of new abilities . Technological advancements allow for support in the acquisition of cognitive capabilities, such as second language acquisition using simple smartphone applications There is, however, one domain of cognition that has...
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...
Joint sense of agency (JSoA) is the feeling of control experienced in joint action over one’s own and a partner’s actions and is proposed to arise from the sensorimotor predictive processes underlying action control and monitoring. In the current study, using interval estimates and neural responses measured by EEG, we aimed to evaluate whether JSoA...
Variability is a property of biological systems, and in animals (including humans) behavioral variability is characterized by certain features, such as the range of variability and shape of its distribution. Nevertheless, only a few studies have investigated whether and how variability features contribute to the ascription of humanness to robots in...
One of the key questions in human–robot interaction research is whether humans perceive robots as intentional agents, or rather only as mindless machines. Research has shown that, in some contexts, people do perceive robots as intentional agents. However, the role of prior exposure to robots as a factor potentially playing a role in the attribution...
One of the key questions in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research is whether humans perceive robots as intentional agents, or rather only as mindless machines. Research has shown that, in some contexts, people do perceive robots as intentional agents. However, the role of prior exposure to robots as a factor potentially playing a role in the attri...
Trust is fundamental in building meaningful social interactions. With the advance of social robotics in collaborative settings, trust in Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) is gaining more and more scientific attention. Indeed, understanding how different factors may affect users’ trust toward robots is of utmost importance. In this study, we focused on...
Trust is fundamental in building meaningful social interactions. With the advance of social robotics in collaborative settings, trust in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is gaining more and more scientific attention. Indeed, understanding how different factors may affect users’ trust toward robots is of utmost importance. In this study, we focused on...
Sense of Agency (SoA) is the feeling of being in control of one’s actions and their outcomes. In a social context, people can experience a “vicarious” SoA over another human’s actions; however, it is still controversial whether the same occurs in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). The present study aimed at understanding whether humanoid robots may eli...
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...
Sense of Agency (SoA) is the feeling of being in control of one’s actions and their outcomes. In a social context, people can experience a “vicarious” SoA over another human’s actions; however, it is still controversial whether the same occurs in Human–Robot Interaction (HRI). The present study aimed at understanding whether humanoid robots may eli...
Variability is a property of biological systems, and in animals (including humans), behavioral variability is characterized by certain features, such as the range of variability and the shape of its distribution. Nevertheless, only a few studies have investigated whether and how variability features contribute to the ascription of humanness to robo...
Social robotics is an emerging field that is expected to grow rapidly in the near future. In fact, it is increasingly more frequent to have robots that operate in close proximity with humans or even collaborate with them in joint tasks. In this context, the investigation of how to endow a humanoid robot with social behavioral skills typical of huma...
In most everyday life situations, the brain needs to engage not only in making decisions, but also in anticipating and predicting the behavior of others. In such contexts, gaze can be highly informative about others’ intentions, goals and upcoming decisions. Here, we investigated whether a humanoid robot’s gaze (mutual or averted) influences the wa...
Sensorimotor signaling is a key mechanism underlying coordination in humans. The increasing presence of artificial agents, including robots, in everyday contexts, will make joint action with them as common as a joint action with other humans. The present study investigates under which conditions sensorimotor signaling emerges when interacting with...
Sensorimotor signaling is a key mechanism underlying coordination in humans. The increasing presence of artificial agents, including robots, in everyday contexts, will make joint action with them as common as a joint action with other humans. The present study investigates under which conditions sensorimotor signaling emerges when interacting with...
In Socially Assistive Robotics, robots are used as social partners for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. However, it is important to keep in mind that this population shows auditory hypo- or hypersensitivity, which results in avoiding or seeking behaviors towards sounds. Robots, from their mechanical embodiment, exhibit motor noises, and we a...
In most everyday life situations, the brain needs to engage not only in making decisions but also in anticipating and predicting the behavior of others. In such contexts, gaze can be highly informative about others’ intentions, goals, and upcoming decisions. Here, we investigated whether a humanoid robot’s gaze (mutual or averted) influences the wa...
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...
Humans interpret and predict others’ behaviors by ascribing them intentions or beliefs, or in other words, by adopting the intentional stance. Since artificial agents are increasingly populating our daily environments, the question arises whether (and under which conditions) humans would apply the “human-model” to understand the behaviors of these...
The presence of artificial agents in our everyday lives is continuously increasing. Hence, the question of how human social cognition mechanisms are activated in interactions with artificial agents, such as humanoid robots, is frequently being asked. One interesting question is whether humans perceive humanoid robots as mere artifacts (interpreting...
Artificial agents are on their way to interact with us daily. Thus, the design of embodied artificial agents that can easily cooperate with humans is crucial for their deployment in social scenarios. Endowing artificial agents with human-like behavior may boost individuals’ engagement during the interaction. We tested this hypothesis in two screen-...
In this study, we examined whether the likelihood of attributing intentionality to robots is influenced by the human-likeness of errors during HRI. To this end, we designed an experimental protocol in which users performed a melody in a joint task with the iCub robot. We programmed the iCub robot to make an error in 60% of the repetitions. For half...
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...
We investigated the influence of visual sensitivity on the performance of an imitation task with the robot R1 in its virtual and physical forms. Virtual and physical embodiments offer different sensory experience to the users. As all individuals respond differently to their sensory environment, their sensory sensitivity may play a role in the inter...
The presence of artificial agents in our everyday lives is continuously increasing. Hence, the question of how human social cognition mechanisms are activated when we interact with artificial agents, such as humanoid robots, has been asked. One interesting question is whether humans perceive humanoid robots as mere artefacts (interpreting their beh...
Artificial agents are on their way to interact with us daily. Thus, the design of embodied artificial agents that can easily cooperate with humans is crucial for their deployment in social scenarios. Endowing artificial agents with human-like behavior may boost individuals' engagement during the interaction. We tested this hypothesis in two screen-...
In most everyday life situations, the brain needs to engage not only in making decisions, but also in anticipating and predicting the behavior of others. In such contexts, gaze can be highly informative about others' intentions, goals and upcoming decisions. Here, we investigated whether a humanoid robot's gaze (mutual or averted) influences the wa...
Understanding the human cognitive processes involved in the interaction with artificial agents is crucial for designing socially capable robots. During social interactions, humans tend to explain and predict others’ behavior adopting the intentional stance, that is, assuming that mental states drive behavior. However, the question of whether humans...
Designing artificial agents that can closely imitate human behavior, might influence humans in perceiving them as intentional agents. Nonetheless, the factors that are crucial for an artificial agent to be perceived as an animated and anthropomorphic being still need to be addressed. In the current study, we investigated some of the factors that mi...
Human-robot interaction research could benefit from knowing how various parameters of robotic eye movement control affect specific cognitive mechanisms of the user, such as attention or perception. In the present study, we systematically teased apart control parameters of Trajectory Time of robot eye movements (rTT) between two joint positions and...
Human-robot interaction research could benefit from knowing how various parameters of robotic eye movement control affect specific cognitive mechanisms of the user, such as attention or perception. In the present study, we systematically teased apart control parameters of Trajectory Time of robot eye movements (rTT) between two joint positions and...
In this paper we present the TobiiGlassesPySuite, an open-source suite we implemented for using the Tobii Pro Glasses 2 wearable eye-tracker in custom eye-tracking studies. We provide a platform-independent solution for controlling the device and for managing the recordings. The software consists of Python modules, integrated into a single package,...
In the presence of others, sense of agency (SoA), i.e. the perceived relationship between our own actions and external events, is reduced. The present study aimed at investigating whether the phenomenon of reduced SoA is observed in human-robot interaction, similarly to human-human interaction. To this end, we tested SoA when people interacted with...
The present study aimed at investigating how eye contact established by a humanoid robot affects engagement in human-robot interaction (HRI). To this end, we combined explicit subjective evaluations with implicit measures, i.e. reaction times and eye tracking. More specifically, we employed a gaze cueing paradigm in HRI protocol involving the iCub...
Long-term motor deficits affect approximately two thirds of stroke survivors, reducing their quality of life. An effective rehabilitation therapy requires intense and repetitive training, which is resource demanding. Virtual Agents (VAs) and Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) offer high intensity, repetitive and reproducible therapy and are thus both...
In the presence of others, sense of agency (SoA), i.e. the perceived relationship between our own actions and external events, is reduced. The present study aimed at investigating whether the phenomenon of reduced SoA is observed in human-robot interaction, similarly to human-human interaction. To this end, we tested SoA when people interacted with...
In this paper we present the TobiiGlassesPySuite, an open-source suite we implemented for using the Tobii Pro Glasses 2 wearable eye-tracker in custom eye-tracking studies. We provide a platform-independent solution for controlling the device and for managing the recordings. The software consists of Python modules, integrated into a single package,...
Robots will soon enter social environments shared with humans. We need robots that are able to efficiently convey social signals during interactions. At the same time, we need to understand the impact of robots’ behavior on the human brain. For this purpose, human behavioral and neural responses to the robot behavior should be quantified offering f...
Robots will soon enter social environments shared with humans. We need robots that are able to efficiently convey social signals during interactions. At the same time, we need to understand the impact of robots’ behavior on the human brain. For this purpose, human behavioral and neural responses to the robot behavior should be quantified offering f...
In this study, we examined if humans adapt their performance to delays in robot’s actions in a leader-follower interaction scenario. Participants were asked to “teach” a sequence of musical tones to the iCub robot. The robot repeated the sequence with decreasing delay between its own taps and taps performed by the participants. We observed that mea...
In the presence of others, sense of agency (SoA), i.e. the perceived relationship between our own actions and external events, is reduced. This effect is thought to contribute to diffusion of responsibility. The present study aimed at examining humans’ SoA when interacting with an artificial embodied agent. Young adults participated in a task along...
Despite well-developed cognitive control mechanisms in most adult healthy humans, attention can still be captured by irrelevant distracting stimuli occurring in the environment. However, when it comes to artificial agents, such as humanoid robots, one might assume that its attention is “programmed” to follow a task, thus, being distracted by attent...
Despite well-developed cognitive control mechanisms in most adult healthy humans, attention can still be captured by irrelevant distracting stimuli occurring in the environment. However, when it comes to artificial agents, such as humanoid robots, one might assume that its attention is “programmed” to fol-low a task, thus, being distracted by atten...
In the presence of others, sense of agency (SoA), i.e. the perceived relation-ship between our own actions and external events, is reduced. This effect is thought to contribute to diffusion of responsibility. The present study aimed at examining humans’ SoA when interacting with an artificial embodied agent. Young adults participated in a task alon...
Despite well-developed cognitive control mechanisms in most adult healthy humans, attention can still be captured by irrelevant distracting stimuli occurring in the environment. However, when it comes to artificial agents, such as humanid robots, one might assume that its attention is “programmed” to follow a task, thus, being distracted by attenti...
Robots will soon enter social environments shared with humans. We need robots that are able to efficiently convey social signals during interactions. At the same time, we need to understand the impact of robots' behavior on the human brain. For this purpose, human behavioral and neural responses to the robot behavior should be quantified offering f...
Citations
... Results showed that averted gaze shifts are prioritized over direct ones, as they could potentially signal the presence of behaviorally relevant information in the environment 34 . Interestingly, these results are in line with those of Abubshait and colleagues 35 , which used Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) to investigate the social effects of communicative gaze (i.e., direct vs. averted gaze) on attentional orienting. Participants were asked to complete a gaze cueing task with the humanoid robot iCub 36 , which engaged either in mutual or averted gaze before shifting its gaze. ...
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... First, our sample was biased toward individuals with high familiarity with NAO and HRI experiments and a high level of comfort with computers. It has been suggested that people with technical backgrounds exposed to social robots are more likely to adopt the intentional stance toward a humanoid robot (Roselli et al., 2023). While our main aim was to explore the role of mental state attribution in robotic gaze following, which might be related to intentional stance adoption, an avenue for future studies is to replicate these findings in samples with different predispositions to adopt the intentional stance to better link it with the role of theory of mind in gaze following. ...
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... We therefore hypothesize that the personalized evaluation criteria are revealed in a differentiated weighting given to energy minimization versus comfort. To maintain a consistent viewpoint across individuals, we generate human-like reaching trajectories and assume that such preferences can be revealed not only when producing self-generated reaching movement, but also when observing others' reaching movements 12,13 , even when these are generated by artifacts such as robots 14 . Furthermore, we monitor brain error-related potentials (ErrP) [15][16][17] , which may be elicited when subjects observe a robot moving around a fragile object, displaying at times daring trajectories around the object. ...
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... Enhanced gamma activity has been associated with mentalizing and Fig. 6 Results from the analyses of resting-state gamma activity. The first two topography plots show the average gamma range (28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33)(34)(35)(36)(37)(38)(39)(40)(41)(42)(43)(44)(45) power, averaged across all subjects for the therapists (left) and roboticists (right). The gamma band power averaged across the entire frequency range was calculated by applying an FFT to the entire dura-tion of the eyes-open resting state data. ...
... Even with anecdotal observation, it is relatively clear that the general perception of her in terms of emotional capability is more or less different from what most people think about chatbots without human-like appearances, such as ChatGPT. Research has shown that when considering the way people view AI agents, anthropomorphism is a noteworthy factor due to how our brain likely relies on social-cognitive processing pathways similar to those in interpersonal relationships to make sense (generating meaning) of the observed entities/phenomena (Airenti, 2018;Marchesi et al., 2022;Rosenthal-von der Putten et al., 2013;Wiese et al., 2017). People's anthropomorphic tendency is different based on individual characteristics, such as personality, age, relationship status, gender, personal connection to animals, and prior experience (Letheren et al., 2016). ...
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... Following the gaze estimation strategy, a learning architecture to detect events of mutual gaze was proposed in [11]. This study emphasized the importance of mutual eye contact as crucial social cue in face-to-face interactions since it can be a signal of the readiness and attention of the interacting partner. ...
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... Past research demonstrated that the presence of a robot gazing at individuals while they perform a task modulates attentional orienting [25][26] , social decision-making 27 , and engagement 28 . For example, in two studies, Spatola et al. 24,29 found that individuals' performance in a Stroop task 30 improved when participants were observed by a social robot rather than when they were observed by a non-social robot or when they were not being observed at all 24 . ...
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... Interactive human-robot studies have shown that human-like errors performed by a humanoid robot have an impact on people's sensorimotor signaling, reflected in lower variability in their performance [43]. Furthermore, human-like range of behavioral variability in joint action seems to be critical for ascription of humanness to a humanoid robot [44]. ...
... Experiments have found that robot gaze has an effect on trust. Establishing eye contact with a robot has a positive effect on the perceived sociality of the robot and the quality of HMI [118]. Kompatsiari, Ciardo, Tikhanoff, Metta, and Wykowska [119] conducted a study on how users evaluate human-like machines based on established eye contact. ...
... However, these are speculative interpretations of the results and the exact mechanisms underlying the phenomena observed in our study will need to be examined in future research. Our results are also in line with recent literature on the adoption of the intentional stance and mind attribution toward robot behaviors (Abubshait et al., 2021;Ciardo et al., 2021;Marchesi et al., 2020). Specifically, Ciardo et al. (2021) report that, when a robot behavior is perceived as more mechanistic in a joint task, participants decrease their likelihood of adopting the intentional stance toward it. ...
