Professor Agnieszka Wykowska leads the unit S4HRI “Social Cognition in Human-Robot Interaction” at the Italian Institute of Technology (Genoa, Italy), where she is also the Coordinator of CHT (the Center for Human Technologies). At IIT, she is also member of the Board of the Scientific Director. In addition, she is a Hans Fischer Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at the Technical University in Munich and an adjunct professor of Engineering Psychology at the Luleå University of Technology. She graduated in neuro-cognitive psychology (2006, LMU Munich), obtained PhD in psychology (2008) and the German “Habilitation” (2013) from LMU Munich. In 2016 she was awarded the ERC Starting grant “InStance": "Intentional Stance for Social Attunement”. In 2024, she was awarded the ERC Proof-of-Concept grant "RONIN": Robot Training Independence. She is Editor-in-Chief of IJSR (International Journal of Social Robotics). Between 2022 and 2024 she served as President of ESCAN (European Society for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience). She is member of ELLIS (European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems) and Board Member of Association of ERC Grantees. She is also a delegate to the ERA Forum (European Research Area), representing stakeholder's group "Individual researchers and innovators". In June 2025 she was elected President-Elect of the Association of ERC Grantees (AERG). In the same year she has been awarded the André Mischke award for outstanding scientists involved in science policy by the Young Academy Europe. In her research, she combines cognitive neuroscience methods with human-robot interaction in order to understand the human brain mechanisms in interaction with natural and artificial agents. Email address: agnieszka.wykowska@iit.it
Website of the ERC InStance project: https://www.instanceproject.eu
Website of the ERC RONIN project: https://roninproject.eu
Most representative publications:
Prescott, T., Vogeley, K., Wykowska, A. (2024). Understanding the Sense of Self through Robotics". Science Robotics, 9, eadn2733. Free copy of the article can be downloaded here: https://www.science.org/stoken/author-tokens/ST-2227/full
Navare, U. P., Ciardo, F., Kompatsiari, K., De Tommaso, D., & Wykowska, A. (2024). When performing actions with robots, attribution of intentionality affects the sense of joint agency. Science Robotics, 9, eadj3665. Free copy of the article can be downloaded here: https://www.science.org/stoken/author-tokens/ST-1961/full
Marchesi, S., De Tommaso, D., Kompatsiari, K., Wu, Y., Wykowska, A. (2024). Tools and methods to study and replicate experiments addressing human social cognition in interactive scenarios. Behavior Research Methods and Instrumentation, 56, 7543-7560. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-024-02434-z
Ciardo, F., De Tommaso, D., Wykowska, A. (2022). Human-like behavioural variability blurs the distinction between a human and a machine in a nonverbal Turing test. Science Robotics, 7, eabo 1241. http://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.abo1241
Marchesi, S., De Tommaso, D., Perez-Osorio, J., Wykowska A. (2022). Belief in sharing the same phenomenological experience increases the likelihood of adopting the intentional stance towards a humanoid robot. Technology, Mind and Behavior, 3: https://doi.org/10.1037/tmb0000072
Belkaid, M., Kompatsiari, K., De Tommaso, D., Zablith, I., & Wykowska, A. (2021). Mutual gaze with a robot affects human neural activity and delays decision-making processes. Science Robotics, 6, eabc5044, http://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.abc5044
Bossi, F., Willemse, C., Cavazza, J., Marchesi, S., Murino, V., Wykowska, A. (2020). The human brain reveals resting state activity patterns that are predictive of biases in attitudes towards robots. Science Robotics, 5, eabb6652, http://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.abb6652
Kompatsiari, K., Ciardo, F., Wykowska, A. (2022). To follow or not to follow your gaze: The interplay between strategic control and the eye contact effect on gaze-induced attention orienting. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 151: 121-136, https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001074
Wykowska, A. (2021). Robots as mirrors of the human mind. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 30, 34-40, https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721420978609
