Embodiment and subjective experience in humanrobot interaction are important aspects to consider when studying both natural cognition and adaptive robotics to human environments. Although several researches have focused on nonverbal communication and collaboration, the study of autonomous physical interaction has obtained less attention. From the perspective of neurorobotics, we investigate the relation between intentionality, motor compliance, cognitive compliance, and behavior emergence. We propose a variational model inspired by the principles of predictive coding and active inference to study intentionality and cognitive compliance, and an intermittent control concept for motor deliberation and compliance based on torque feed-back. Our experiments with the humanoid Torobo portrait interesting perspectives for the bio-inspired study of developmental and social processes.

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Interdisciplinary efforts from developmental psychology, phenomenology, and philosophy of mind, have studied the rudiments of social cognition and conceptualized distinct forms of intersubjective communication and interaction at human early life. Interaction theorists consider primary intersubjectivity a non-mentalist, pre-theoretical, non-conceptual sort of processes that ground a certain level of communication and understanding, and provide support to higher-level cognitive skills. We argue the study of human/neurorobot interaction consists in a unique opportunity to deepen understanding of underlying mechanisms in social cognition through synthetic modeling, while allowing to examine a second person experiential (2PP) access to intersubjectivity in embodied dyadic interaction. Concretely, we propose the study of primary intersubjectivity as a 2PP experience characterized by predictive engagement, where perception, cognition, and action are accounted for an hermeneutic circle in dyadic interaction. From our interpretation of the concept of active inference in free-energy principle theory, we propose an open-source methodology named neural robotics library (NRL) for experimental human/neurorobot interaction, wherein a demonstration program named virtual Cartesian robot (VCBot) provides an opportunity to experience the aforementioned embodied interaction to general audiences. Lastly, through a study case, we discuss some ways human-robot primary intersubjectivity can contribute to cognitive science research, such as to the fields of developmental psychology, educational technology, and cognitive rehabilitation.

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