Human Machine Interaction and Communication in Cooperative Actions - Bioinspired Approaches for Human-Centric Technologies - page 242

researchers observed conditions where the motor resonance effect was similar for
human and nonhuman agents observation (Liepelt et al. 2010 ; Press et al. 2007 ).
In summary, there seems to be the possibility for robotic agents to evoke motor
resonance and then induce the action-mediated understanding in a human partner, but
the robot shape, the context in which it is immersed, and the way it moves need to be
appropriately planned (Fig. 8.1 ). Moreover, as we are interested in the behavioral
consequences of motor resonance, with specific attention to the corresponding
facilitation in the interaction, we have to be particularly careful. In fact, if at the
neurophysiological level the mirror neuron system activation seems to be present also
for very nonbiological stimuli (i.e., when the nonbiological agent moves with a
nonbiological kinematics, e.g., Cross et al. 2012 ; Gazzola et al. 2007 ), some behav-
ioral effects require a higher degree of human resemblance also in terms of robot
motion (Chaminade et al. 2005 ).
8.2.1 Anticipation of the Robot Action Goal
Having considered the elements in an interaction that might depend on the activa-
tion of the resonance mechanism, we focus now on goal anticipation. The ability to
understand the actions of others and to attribute intentionality to them is crucial for
collaboration, and it has been proposed to depend on motor resonance (Rizzolatti
and Sinigaglia 2010 ; Southgate et al. 2009 ). Humans' natural tendency to shift their
gaze to the action goal before the action is completed is one of the manifestations of
such goal attribution. It is important to note that intuitive goal anticipation occurs
naturally only in the presence of other people. Previous studies failed to find
anticipatory gaze shifts toward the spatial destination of an object moving by itself
(Falck-Ytter et al. 2006 ; Flanagan and Johansson 2003 ), even if the object move-
ment followed biological rules and the target position was unambiguous. Adult
observers exhibited anticipatory gaze behavior in the presence of a nonbiological
agent when the latter could be interpreted as a tool they could use (a mechanical
claw), while anticipation was not exhibited by young infants (4-10 months old), not
as familiar with that tool (Kanakogi and Itakura 2011 ).
In Sciutti et al. ( in press ), we addressed the question of whether this kind of
intuitive goal understanding can occur not only between humans, but also with
humanoid robots. More precisely, we have measured whether human partners
instinctively anticipate with their gaze the goal of an action performed by a robot,
as they normally would during human observation. Our results, obtained with a
humanoid robot following a biologically plausible motion, indicated a similar
implicit processing of humans' and robots' actions, yielding the same automatic
anticipatory behavior (Sciutti et al. in press ). So humans are automatically
predicting the partner's action goal, even if he actually is a robot.