You are cordially invited to the Seminar organized by the Psychology Department.
Date & Time: October 18, 2024; Friday at 12:30
Place: BZ-04
The presentation language will be English.
Presenter: Dr. Tuğçe Nur Pekçetin (Bilkent University)
Title:
Dynamics of Mind Perception in Human-Robot Interaction: A Cognitive Science Perspective
Abstract:
Mind perception is a fundamental aspect of human cognition, and the human capacity to attribute mental states extends to nonhuman entities, and even to non-living entities such as technological devices. With the increasing integration of artificial intelligence and robots in society, understanding how people perceive social robots becomes more relevant, as it shapes future robot designs and provides insights into human social cognition. Despite extensive research on mind perception in the context of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), contradictory results in the literature highlight areas for improvement in measurement validity and experimental design. In this talk, I will present my PhD research investigating the dynamics of mind perception in HRI, considering multiple determinants related to both the perceiver and the perceived entity and addressing the aforementioned challenges. I will discuss our innovative methodology, which combined implicit and explicit tasks in a naturalistic lab setting with live actors, enabling us to test both a robot and a human while maintaining experimental control across 160 participants from four generations. I will share our findings from three key areas: the influence of agent type (human vs. robot), the impact of action type (communicative vs. noncommunicative), and generational differences in mental state attribution. My talk will emphasize the importance of using normed stimuli, testing physically present robots, considering both perceiver- and perceived-related factors, and employing multiple assessment methods to capture the full complexity of mind perception processes.
Bio:
Tuğçe Nur Pekçetin obtained her PhD from the Cognitive Science (COGS) Program at Middle East Technical University in September 2024, where she also completed her Master’s in COGS focusing on eye movement control in Turkish reading and a Bachelor’s in Foreign Language Teaching. She has recently been awarded the TUBITAK 2218 National Postdoctoral Research Fellowship to work as a post-doctoral researcher in the Cognitive Computational Neuroscience Lab at Bilkent University’s Aysel Sabuncu Brain Research Center. Her PhD research investigated mind perception dynamics in human-robot interaction through innovative, naturalistic experimental setups. She conducted online and face-to-face experiments with diverse participant groups, publishing findings in prestigious journals and conferences including the Journal of Visualized Experiments, ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), and the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Earlier this year, she was selected for the HRI 2024 Pioneers Workshop, recognizing top student researchers in HRI. Tuğçe’s research interests span cognitive science, human-robot interaction, mind perception, and experimental psychology. In her post-doctoral research at Bilkent University, she will study the perception of human and robot actions considering the contextual factors.