Machine Meets Other Mind: Social Cognition in the Age of Human–Robot Interaction

Amidst the fourth industrial revolution, social robots are moving firmly from fiction to reality. As sophisticated artificial intelligences becoming more prevalent in daily life, there is an urgent need for the development of social robotics to properly address the relationship between robotics, humans, and contexts. Currently, researchers in different fields are grappling with questions about how humans perceive and interact with these intelligences and the extent to which the human brain incorporates intelligent machines into the human social environment. Recent findings, current challenges, and future directions of human-robot interactions (HRI) present the complexity of interdisciplinary perspectives and gradually give rise to the issue of reciprocal constraints on HRI and social cognition, specifically related to anthropomorphism of HRIs and second-person social interactions. Related reflections have conceived a social neuroscience framework for HRI. The framework focuses on the multidimensional space and feature similarity of anthropomorphic HRI on nonverbal communication and compares the neural mechanisms of HHI and HRI with the help of the second-person neuroscience paradigm. The future of machine’s other minds remains to integrate findings from diverse but complementary research fields such as cognitive computational neuroscience, social neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, and robotics to reshape the potential and limits of social robotics in future human social life.