EXC 2002/1: Multimodal Interaction and Communication (TP 09)

The overall goal of this project is to create a robot that can represent and integrate information from different sources and modalities for successful, task-oriented interactions with other agents. To fully understand the mechanisms of social interaction and communication in humans and to replicate this complex human skill in technological artefacts, we must provide effective means of knowledge transfer between agents. The first step of this project is therefore to describe core components and determinants of communicative behaviour including joint attention, partner co-representation, information processing from different modalities and the role of motivation and personal relevance. We will compare these functions in human-human, human-robot and robot-robot interactions to identify commonalities and differences. This comparison will also consider the role of different presumed partner attributes (e.g. a robot described as “social” or “intelligent”). We will conduct behavioural, electrophysiological and fMRI experiments to describe the microstructure of communicative behaviour.