Bishakha Chaudhury
Papers
9
Total Citations
146
H-Index
6
About
Bishakha Chaudhury is a cognitive neuroscientist and human-robot interaction researcher whose work sits at the fascinating intersection of social psychology, neuroscience, and robotics. Her research primarily investigates how humans form social relationships with robots, probing the boundaries of empathy, cooperation, and mind attribution in an increasingly automated world. Chaudhury's most influential contribution — a neuroimaging study exploring how socializing with a robot shapes empathy for pain (69 citations) — demonstrated that human empathic responses are remarkably flexible and can extend to robotic agents, offering groundbreaking insights into the neural underpinnings of human-robot bonding. Building on this, her extensive work using prisoner's dilemma paradigms reveals that people exhibit genuine reciprocity and conditional prosociality toward robots, suggesting that social instincts are not strictly reserved for biological agents. Her research further challenges assumptions about human-likeness, showing that a robot's perceived "socialness" may matter more than its physical appearance when people attribute mental states to machines. Complementing her laboratory findings, Chaudhury has also developed practical methodologies for tracking real-world human-robot interactions over multiple days, bridging experimental rigor with ecological validity. Collectively, her work provides essential foundations for designing socially intelligent robots and understanding human social cognition more broadly.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
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- 2Human-Robot Cooperation in Prisoner Dilemma Games20 citations · 2020
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