Sabrina Sobieraj

Papers

Total Citations

520

H-Index

About

Sabrina Sobieraj is a pioneering researcher in human-robot interaction, with a focus on the emotional and neural underpinnings of how we relate to machines. Her work bridges social robotics and cognitive neuroscience, exploring whether humans feel empathy toward robots. In her landmark 2012 study, "An Experimental Study on Emotional Reactions Towards a Robot" (308 citations), she provided foundational evidence that people exhibit genuine emotional responses—both physiological and subjective—when witnessing a robot being treated affectionately or violently. She then advanced this line of inquiry using functional MRI, as detailed in her 2014 paper "Investigations on Empathy Towards Humans and Robots Using fMRI" (156 citations). Here, Sobieraj demonstrated overlapping neural activation in brain regions associated with empathy—such as the anterior cingulate cortex and insula—when participants observed violent interactions toward both humans and robots, but not toward inanimate objects. Her 2013 fMRI studies (29 and 27 citations) further confirmed that the brain processes harm to a robot similarly to harm to a person, challenging assumptions about the uniqueness of human-directed empathy. Sobieraj’s work has profound implications for ethical AI design and our evolving relationship with social robots.