No relationship is easy. If humans are ever to truly relate to robotic companions and teachers, we’ll have to ensure they trigger a specific type of brain activity that we get from interacting with real people. So say researchers who have shown that a robotic hand can be made to activate the brain machinery partly responsible for empathy with other humans.
Robots are increasingly entering our lives as companions, educational aides and medical assistants. But till now no one had probed whether the human brain responds to these automatons in the same way that it does to human helpers.
To find out, Lindsay Oberman and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, decided to see what effect robots have on mirror neurons (DOI: 10.1016/j.neucom.2006.02.024). These are brain cells that fire not only when an individual performs an action, but also when they see someone else perform that action. “Evidence suggests these neurons are needed for mimicry, learning, language acquisition and empathy,” says Oberman.
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The researchers recorded the brain activity of volunteers while they were shown videos of a metallic, five-fingered robotic hand opening and closing and grasping an object. They also recorded the activity while a video of random static was shown.
The team found that videos of the hand triggered activity in an area at the front of the brain containing mirror neurons, while the static did not. This indicates that humans make sense of the robotic action in the same way that they would if it had been carried out by a human.
The discovery could trigger a new approach to robot design. In the same way that the Turing test is about whether a robot can pass itself off as human in a written conversation, brain scans of human observers could form the basis for a “neural Turing test” that would measure a robot’s ability to engage our brains. “If we want humanoid robots to teach or have other social functions, we need them to trigger mirror neurons,” says Oberman.
The next step is to work out which robot characteristics best trigger mirror neurons. “I would like to see tests on a spectrum of different humanoid robots that might tell us what it is that can trigger this neural system, and to what degree,” says Kerstin Dautenhahn, who studies human-robot interaction at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, UK.
However, she warns, mirror-neuron stimulating robots could also be used to unfairly influence thoughts and feelings. “It is not always desirable to try and affect people in this way. We will need to be careful.”
“Robots that stimulate mirror neurons could also be used unfairly”
