Differential neural responses to humans vs. robots: an event-related potential study

Do we perceive humanoid robots as human beings? Recent neuroimaging studies have reported similarity in the neural processing of human and robot actions in the superior temporal sulcus area but a differential neural response in the premotor area. These studies suggest that the neural activity of the occipitotemporal region would not be affected by appearance information. Unlike those studies, in this study, by using the inversion effect as an index, we demonstrated for the first time that the appearance information of a presented action affects neural responses in the occipitotemporal region. In event-related potential (ERP) studies, the inversion effect is the phenomenon whereby an upright face- and body-sensitive ERP component in the occipitotemporal region is enhanced and delayed up to 200 ms in response to an inverted face and body, but not to an inverted object. We used three kinds of walking animation with different appearance information (human, robot, and point-light) as well as inverted stimuli of each appearance. The anatomical structure and walking speed of the presented stimuli were all identical. The results showed that the inversion effect occurred in the right occipitotemporal region only in response to human appearance, and not robotic and point-light appearances. That is, the amplitude of the inverted condition of human appearance was significantly larger than that of the upright condition only. Our results, which are contrary to other recent neuroimaging studies, suggested that appearance information affects the neural response in the occipitotemporal region.