Robots In Pain Need Empathy, Similar To Human Beings

First Posted: Nov 03, 2015 11:26 AM EST

Researchers found the first neurophysiological evidence for human empathy toward robots in perceived pain. This new study is allowing researchers to better understand interaction between humans and robots in social situations, according to a study by researchers at Toyohashi University of Technology.

The researchers were inspired to carry out this study because robots are becoming quite popular among human activities. The focus of their study was to determine how the human brain reacts to humanoid robots in distressed situations. Also, the researchers wanted to determine the difference in human empathy towards fellow humans and robots.

The researchers performed electroencephalography (EEG) in 15 healthy adults, who observed pictures of either a human or robotic hand in painful and non-painful situations, like a finger being cut off with a knife.

The researchers found that there were increasing levels of brain potentials for empathy toward humanoid robots in perceived pain, which was similar to levels while seeing humans in pain. However, initially in the top-down process, there was less empathy towards robots than towards humans.

Previous studies in empathy were more perspective taking, according to the researchers. The results of the study showed that humans empathize with humanoid robots in a similar manner as they do with other human beings. However, our ability to empathize is much weaker with robots. This probably because of humans do not have the ability take the robot's perspective into consideration, according to the researchers.

It is almost impossible for this to happen since human and robots have different compositions. In their next study, the researchers are aiming to manipulate humans' perspective taking of robots. This will lead into the development of human friendly robots that people can be comfortable with, and even have empathy toward those robots, according to the researchers.

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TagsRobots, Social robots, Artificial intelligence, artificial neural network, Humans, Humanoid, human activities, Toyohashi University of Technology, Empathy, Sympathy, Robot Human Interaction, robotics