Using therapeutic robots for evaluating mentalizing capabilities in Autism

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Individuals with autism generally show better performance on operating physical objects than in communicating with people; however, we lack a plausible model of autism that explains why their physical and social capabilities develop in separate and unbalanced ways. This research project investigates this question from the viewpoint of "Mentalizing Filter", which derives social information (states of mind) from the appearance and/or behavior of others, through a series of longitudinal observations of autistic children interacting with communication robots. The observations, with the help of psychological experiments using an eye-tracker, we found "Cognitive Granularity" (the unit size of cognitive operations) plays an important role in mentalizing others' appearance and behavior.