As the field of social robotics has been dynamically growing and expanding over various areas of research and application, in which robots can be of assistance and companionship for humans, this paper offers a different perspective on a role that social robots can also play, namely the role of informing us about flexibility of human mechanisms of social cognition. The paper focuses on studies in which robots have been used as a new type of “stimuli” in psychological experiments to examine whether similar mechanisms of social cognition would be activated in interaction with a robot, as would be elicited in interaction with another human. Analysing studies in which a direct comparison has been made between a robot and a human agent, the paper examines whether for robot agents, the brain re-uses the same mechanisms that have been developed for interaction with other humans in terms of perception, action representation, attention and higher-order social cognition. Based on this analysis, the paper concludes that the human socio-cognitive mechanisms, in adult brains, are sufficiently flexible to be re-used for robotic agents, at least for those that have some level of resemblance to humans.

随着社交机器人技术领域在各个研究和应用领域的动态增长和扩展，在这些领域机器人可以为人类提供帮助和陪伴，因此本文对社交机器人也可以扮演的角色提供了不同的见解。告知我们有关人类社会认知机制灵活性的作用。本文着重研究在心理实验中将机器人用作新型“刺激”的研究，以检查与机器人互动时是否会激活类似的社会认知机制，就像在与另一个人互动时一样。通过分析研究，我们已经对机器人和人类特工进行了直接比较，本文研究了是否使用机器人特工，大脑在感知，动作表示，注意力和更高阶的社会认知方面，会重复使用与其他人互动所开发的相同机制。基于此分析，本文得出的结论是，成年人大脑中的人类社会认知机制具有足够的灵活性，可以重复用于机器人代理，至少对于与人类具有某种相似程度的代理而言。