Nadine Wirkuttis

Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University

Papers

Total Citations

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About

Nadine Wirkuttis is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of cognitive robotics and computational neuroscience, with a primary focus on understanding the mechanisms underlying social interaction. Her work centers on applying the free energy principle and active inference frameworks to model how robots can develop sophisticated social behaviors, particularly turn-taking and leader-follower dynamics. In her most cited work (2023, 12 citations), Wirkuttis demonstrated how dyadic imitative interactions can emerge through robotic simulations, revealing that a single parameter introduced during model training can determine the development of turn-taking patterns. Her earlier foundational study (2021) explored how the sense of agency dynamically shapes social interactions between robotic agents, using variational recurrent neural network models to examine how individual perceptions of control influence collective behavior. Though her citation counts are modest, Wirkuttis’s work represents a significant theoretical contribution to developmental robotics, offering mechanistic explanations for how social cognition might emerge from first principles. Her research bridges the gap between high-level social phenomena and low-level neural computation, providing a framework that could inform both robotic design and our understanding of human social development.