Title :
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
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;
Conference_Titel :
Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), 2013 8th ACM/IEEE International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Tokyo
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4673-3099-2
Electronic_ISBN :
2167-2121
DOI :
10.1109/HRI.2013.6483578
