Roman Liepelt

Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, University of Münster, FernUniversität in Hagen

Papers

Total Citations

483

H-Index

About

Roman Liepelt is a pioneering cognitive scientist whose research sits at the intersection of social neuroscience and human-robot interaction. His work fundamentally explores how the human brain processes and responds to robotic agents, challenging traditional boundaries between social and non-social cognition. Liepelt's most influential contribution demonstrates that robotic movement preferentially engages the action observation network (AON)—a brain system traditionally reserved for understanding human actions—with his seminal 2011 paper garnering 199 citations. He further revolutionized the field by showing that humans automatically corepresent the actions of humanoid robots, a phenomenon previously thought exclusive to human-human interaction (168 citations). His comprehensive 2015 review (103 citations) synthesized how stimulus and knowledge cues shape our perception of animacy, establishing a theoretical framework for understanding when we treat robots as social partners. Liepelt's work has profound implications for designing more effective human-robot collaboration systems and understanding the neural mechanisms underlying social cognition. By systematically investigating how deeply we include robotic agents in our sense of self, he has opened new avenues for studying the plasticity of social perception in an increasingly automated world.