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About

Jane Vincent is a researcher whose work sits at the fascinating intersection of human emotion, mobile technology, and social robotics. Her scholarship centers on how people form deep emotional bonds with everyday technologies—particularly mobile phones—and how these relationships parallel and inform our understanding of social robots. Vincent's most influential contribution, "Social Robots from a Human Perspective" (2015), has garnered 77 citations and anchors a broader body of work examining how humans project emotion, identity, and social meaning onto intelligent devices. Her 2013 paper "Is the Mobile Phone a Personalized Social Robot?" provocatively reframes the smartphone not merely as a communication tool, but as an emotionally significant companion that people turn to in times of psychological need. This line of inquiry extends through her exploration of artificial intelligence's longstanding ambition—dating to the 1950s—to simulate human thought and emotion, as examined in "Social Robots and Emotion: Transcending the Boundary Between Humans and ICTs." With multiple publications in 2013 and 2015 and a cumulative citation record reflecting growing scholarly interest, Vincent has established herself as a thoughtful voice in the humanistic study of emerging technologies, helping students and researchers understand the profoundly personal dimensions of our digital lives.