Abdulaziz Abubshait
George Mason University, Italian Institute of Technology, TU Wien
Papers
26
Total Citations
359
H-Index
9
About
Abdulaziz Abubshait is a cognitive neuroscientist and human-robot interaction researcher whose work sits at the fascinating intersection of social cognition, attention, and artificial agents. His research primarily investigates how humans perceive and interact with robots, with a particular focus on gaze behavior, mind perception, and the intentional stance — the cognitive tendency to attribute mental states to non-human entities. His most cited work, "You Look Human, But Act Like a Machine" (2017, 149 citations), demonstrated that both a robot's appearance and its behavioral reliability modulate how humans follow its gaze, revealing that mind perception fundamentally shapes social attention. Subsequent studies extended these findings by examining how repetitive robot behavior, contextual framing, and cultural background influence attentional orienting and intentionality attribution. Abubshait has also employed neuroimaging and brain stimulation techniques, including EEG and TMS, to uncover the neural underpinnings of gaze-cue processing and prefrontal involvement in social attention. His more recent work explores practical applications, such as using humanoid robots as cognitive offloading tools. Collectively, his research advances our understanding of the psychological and neural mechanisms that govern human-robot social interaction, with meaningful implications for robot design and human-centered AI development.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
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- 10Can humanoid robots be used as a cognitive offloading tool?5 citations · 2025