Using therapeutic robots for evaluating mentalizing capabilities in Autism

自闭症患者通常在操作实物方面表现优于与人交流；然而，我们缺乏一个合理的自闭症模型来解释为什么他们的身体和社会能力以分开和不平衡的方式发展。本研究项目通过对自闭症儿童与交流机器人互动的一系列纵向观察，从“心理过滤器”（Mentalizing Filter）的角度来研究这个问题，该观点从他人的外表和/或行为中获取社会信息（心理状态）。通过眼动仪的心理实验，我们发现“认知粒度”（认知操作的单位大小）在对他人外表和行为的心理化中起着重要作用。

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.