Intentional Stance Towards Humanoid Robots

Professor Agnieszka Wykowska is the head of the unit “Social Cognition in Human-Robot Interaction” at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), in Genoa, Italy. She is also the Coordinator of the Centre for Human Technologies, at the IIT. Her background is Cognitive Neuroscience (M.Sc. in 2006 from the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich) and Philosophy (M.A. in 2001 from the Jagiellonian University, Cracow). She obtained a PhD in Psychology (2008) from the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. She is Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Social Robotics. Between 2022 and 2024 she served in the role of President of the European Society for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (ESCAN). She is also board member of Association of ERC Grantees and a delegate to the European Research Area (ERA) Forum – an EU expert group shaping EU science policies. Her research foci are interdisciplinary, bridging psychology, cognitive neuroscience, robotics and healthcare. She combines cognitive neuroscience methods with human-robot interaction to understand the human brain mechanisms in interaction with other humans and with technology. In 2016 she was awarded the ERC Starting grant “InStance: Intentional Stance for Social Attunement”, a project which spanned across six years and examined factors and conditions under which humans adopt the Intentional Stance towards humanoid robots. This book is a culmination of that project.

• Introduction by Agnieszka Wykowska.- Operationalization of the Intentional Stance.- Factors affecting the Intentional Stance I – The Human.- Factors affecting the Intentional Stance II – The Robot.- Factors affecting the Intentional Stance III – The Interaction.- Conclusions by Agnieszka Wykowska.-  Supplementary materials by Davide De Tommaso.