Published as part ofThe Handbook on Socially Interactive Agents Chapter 9 -Theory of Mind and Joint Attention environment, or coordinate interactions, such as biological motion, facial expressions, and eye and head movements. Furthermore, those signals are tightly linked to higher cognitive processes like recognizing others' feelings and internal states, identifying others' intentions, or deciding whether they are friend or foe. Understanding the neurobiological basis of behavior is crucial for cognitive, developmental, clinical, comparative, and social psychology, as well as philosophy and evolutionary anthropology [Singer 2012]. In this context, examining the engagement of social brain areas in interactions with artificial agents seems like a natural step to follow for HAI as well." Using a combination of subjective/explicit measures like self-report and questionnaires, and objective measures like metrics related to performance, behavior, psychophysiology, and neuroimaging, HAI is able to have a more comprehensive view of behavioral and brain mechanisms involved in social interactions with human and non-human agents. The present chapter provides an overview from the perspective of SCN regarding theory of mind (ToM) and joint attention (JA) as crucial mechanisms of social cognition and discusses how these mechanisms have been investigated in social interaction with artificial agents. In the final sections, the chapter reviews computational models of ToM and JA in social robots (SRs) and intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) and discusses the current challenges and future directions.
Theory of Mind and Joint Attention-Crucial
Mechanisms of Social Cognition
Theory of MindImagine that as you are walking on the street someone is coming from the opposite direction toward you. At some point, and before passing each other, the person all of a sudden puts the palm of her/his hand on their forehead, stops walking, turns around, and goes back to where she/he came from. How would you explain this behavior? Probably, you would guess that she/he might have forgotten something and decided to go back. And you might be right. Importantly, most of the explanations you would choose to explain the observed behavior would refer to mental states, such as thoughts, preferences, intentions, or emotions. This is based on the ability to perceive and understand that others have beliefs, desires, goals, and knowledge different from your