The exploration of behavioral and neural measurements for autism therapy using robot

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Mentalizing is the ability to attribute mental states to other agents. The lack of mentalizing, which is required in actual social contexts, may cause serious social disorders such as autism. However, the mechanism of online mentalizing is still unclear. In this study, we explored various behavioral and neural measurements indicating online mentalizing ability. We found that behavioral entropy (which indicates the randomness of decision making) was an efficient behavioral index for online mentalizing in a human-human competitive game. Participants played the game with a humanoid robot; the results indicated that the entropy was significantly higher in participants whose gaze followed the robot's head turn than not, although the explicit human-likeness of the robot did not correlate with behavioral entropy. We also found the neural correlates behind the online mentalizing ability.