Neural correlates of empathy towards robots

Author

Rosenthal-von der Putten, Astrid M. ; Schulte, F.P. ; Eimler, S.C. ; Hoffmann, Lionel ; Sobieraj, S. ; Maderwald, S. ; Kramer, N.C. ; Brand, Matthew

Author_Institution

Univ. of Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, Germany

fYear

2013

Firstpage

215

Lastpage

216

Abstract

We conducted an fMRI study to investigate emotionality in human-robot interaction. Subjects (N=14) were presented videos showing a human, a robot and an unanimated object, being treated in either an affectionate or a violent way. Violent interaction towards both the robot and the human resulted in similar neural activation patterns in classic limbic structures indicating that both the robot and the human elicit similar emotional reactions. However, differences in neural activity suggest that participants show more negative empathetic concern for the human in a negative situation.

Keywords

biomedical MRI; human-robot interaction; medical image processing; neurophysiology; psychology; video signal processing; emotional reactions; fMRI; human-robot interaction emotionality; limbic structures; negative empathetic concern; negative situation; neural activation patterns; neural activity; unanimated object; violent interaction; Hippocampus; Human-robot interaction; Magnetic resonance imaging; Process control; Robots; Videos; empathy; experimental study; functional magnetic resonance imaging; human-robot interaction;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), 2013 8th ACM/IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Tokyo

ISSN

2167-2121

Print_ISBN

978-1-4673-3099-2

Electronic_ISBN

2167-2121

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/HRI.2013.6483578

Filename

6483578