Robots are currently the center of attention in various fields of research because of their potential use as assistants for daily living. In this article, I highlight a different role that robots can play—being a tool for understanding human cognition. I provide examples in which robots have been used in experimental psychology to study sociocognitive mechanisms such as joint attention and sense of agency. I also discuss the issue of whether and when robots (especially those that resemble humans) are perceived through a human-centered lens with anthropomorphic attributions. In the final section, I describe approaches in which the robots’ embodiment has been used for the implementation of computational models of human cognition. In sum, the collection of studies presented here shows that robots can be an extremely useful tool for scientific inquiry in the areas of experimental psychology and cognitive science.

由于机器人有可能用作日常生活的助手，因此机器人目前已成为各个研究领域的关注焦点。在本文中，我重点介绍了机器人可以扮演的不同角色，它是理解人类认知的工具。我提供了一些例子，在这些例子中，实验心理学中使用了机器人来研究社会认知机制，例如共同注意力和代理意识。我还将讨论是否以及何时通过具有拟人属性的以人为中心的镜头感知机器人（尤其是类似于人类的机器人）的问题。在最后一节中，我描述了将机器人的实施例用于实现人类认知计算模型的方法。总共，