We present three humanoid robots aimed as platforms for research in robotics, and cognitive development in robotics systems. The ’priscilla’ robot is a 180cm full scale humanoid, and the mid-size prototype is called ’elvis’ and is about 70cm tall. The smallest size humanoid is the ’elvina’ type, about 28 cm tall. Two instances of ’elvina’ have been built to enable experiments with cooperating h...

The present research proposes schema congruity as a theoretical basis for examining the effectiveness and consequences of product anthropomorphism. Results of two studies suggest that the ability of consumers to anthropomorphize a product and their consequent evaluation of that product depend on the extent to which that product is endowed with characteristics congruent with the proposed human s...

Unless we recognize our innate biases in animal model choice, we limit our potential as experimenters. Two biases seem common from my observations. First is the anthropomorphism that we all seem to get from the monkeys in zoos and circuses, coming as it does long before we aspire to be scientists. Second is for the animal or animals with which we worked during our early days in our fields. Both...

terms does not accomplish the leap across this logical gap. The only way the abstraction process works is via such bridge concepts which link causal and empathic by definition, and by means of parallelistic assumptions about the nature of the apparatus and the nature of experience, such as we have described in the earlier portion of this paper. There are several varieties of concepts which spea...

We investigate the problem of how nonnatural entities are represented by examining university students' concepts of God, both professed theological beliefs and concepts used in comprehension of narratives. In three story processing tasks, subjects often used an anthropomorphic God concept that is inconsistent with stated theological beliefs; and drastically distorted the narratives without any ...

This paper outlines our approach to explore the impact of using two different robotic embodiments on an operators ability to convey emotional and conversational nonverbal signals to a distant interlocutor. Although a human’s ability to produce and interpret complex, dynamic facial expressions is seen as an important factor for human-human social interaction, it remains controversial in humanoid...

CORA is a robotic assistant whose task is to collaborate with a human operator on simple manipulation or handling tasks. Its sensory channels comprising vision, audition, haptics, and force sensing are used to extract perceptual information about speech, gestures and gaze of the operator, and object recognition. The anthropomorphic robot arm makes goaldirected movements to pick up and hand-over...