Name: Trevor Patten

Master’s Thesis Proposal Meeting

Data: Tuesday, September 9th, 2025

Time: 4:00PM – 5:00PM

Location: Virtual, Meeting 

Thesis Chair/Advisor:
Mengyao Li, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)

Thesis Committee Members:

Bruce Walker, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)

Mark Himmelstein, Pd.D. (Georgia Tech)

Title: Simulating Interoception in Robot Teammates: Effect of Internal Arousal Display and Framing on Human Cooperation

Abstract:

Human-robot teams under mixed motive tasking struggle to achieve similar levels of cooperation to human-human teams. Past research has established that social cues discernable through vision and audition are effective at reducing the exploitation bias of robot teammates. Humans rely on more than just easily discernable cues to understand teammates. The interoceptive sense, along with additional social cues, updates the Theory of Mind to better predict how partners may interact under mixed motives. While the role of interoception in human-human interaction is known, humans may be able to leverage the interoceptive sense to robots despite robot teammates lacking the viscera that makes the interoceptive sense possible. 

This study will investigate how the human interoceptive sense could be supported with robot teammates to enhance cooperation outcomes on mixed-motive tasking. A 2 (neutral, interoceptive framing) by 2 (internal display, no display) between-subjects design will assess cooperation rates with the robot teammate. The expected results of the study are that humans cooperate more with robot teammates when their interoceptive sense is supported through either interoceptive framing or a display of the robot’s internal arousal. Individual differences in Theory of Mind ability and interoceptive accuracy can potentially influence the effect of the between-subjects manipulation.  

The findings of this study may support future research into how humans form cooperative teams with robots at an intuitive level and draw attention to the role of the interoceptive sense in human-robot team dynamics.