Patrizia Marti: Robots “in the wild”: observational studies in natural settings

The talk present the results of observational studies in natural settings on the use of social robots as therapeutic or educational tools. The studies show that social robots can play a positive role in favouring positive feelings and emotional commitment, and in mediating social exchanges in people with relational disturbances.

More in detail, the studies show that the creation of significance and interpretation during the interaction with the robot depends on not just the machine’s physical and functional characteristics but also, and mostly, on the specific context of interaction, on the design of meaningful activities, on the personal history that every interlocutor calls into play and on the perception of mutual affordances, some of which come from the stimulus given by touching, hearing, seeing and moving, others from psychological processes that mediate empathic response.

For this reason it is fundamental to study human-robot interaction “in the wild” in order to favor the creation of natural ways for involvement in the activity, the perception of interactive experience at a level not only physical and functional but also aesthetic, perceptual and emotional in the same way this daily happens in familiar and natural settings.