Papers
6
Total Citations
744
H-Index
5
About
Tilo Kircher investigates the fascinating intersection of social robotics, cognitive neuroscience, and theory of mind (ToM)—the human capacity to attribute mental states to others. His pioneering work explores how people perceive and interact with machines, particularly whether we implicitly treat robots as social beings. Kircher’s landmark 2008 fMRI study, “Can Machines Think?” (486 citations), demonstrated that humans engage brain networks involved in social cognition when interacting with robots, revealing neural correlates of anthropomorphism. His follow-up user study (115 citations) systematically examined how a robot’s appearance and actions shape human expectations and representations. Kircher further advanced this field by investigating online mentalising during real-time human-robot interaction (88 citations), and by directly probing whether humans apply ToM to robots (47 citations). Collectively, his research shows that our brains readily attribute intentions and perspectives to machines, blurring the line between social and artificial agents. Kircher’s work has profound implications for designing more intuitive social robots and understanding human social cognition in an increasingly automated world.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1
- 2Understanding social robots: A user study on anthropomorphism115 citations · 2008
- 3Online mentalising investigated with functional MRI88 citations · 2009
- 4Theory of mind (ToM) on robots47 citations · 2008
- 5Theory of Mind (ToM) on Robots: A Functional Neuroimaging Study5 citations · 2007
- 6Theory of Mind (ToM) on Robots: A Neuroimaging Study3 citations · 2008