You, Robot

Download a PDF version of the comic in Italian/French

Understanding how we perceive and interact with others is a core challenge of social cognition research. This challenge is poised to intensify in importance as the ubiquity of artificial intelligence and the presence of humanoid robots in society grows. By innovatively combining psychology, neuroscience and robotics, the SOCIAL ROBOTS project, led by Prof. Emily Cross (University of Glasgow) helps prepare us for this future by establishing a new approach for understanding how the human brain processes and responds to socially interactive robots.
In You, Robot, Emmanuel Espinasse imagines how our society would look like with the arrival of social robots in our everyday life. Smart dolls, electronic caregivers, artificial companions, collaborative robots... how would their presence among us have an influence on the way we interact with other human beings, and modify how we build our identities? The story explores these questions through the experiences of Lucy, Anastasius, Nadir and Pavel.

The science behind the comic

Emily S. Cross (researcher)

Emily S. Cross is a professor of cognitive neuroscience and a dancer based at University of Glasgow, where she directs the Social Brain in Action Laboratory. Originally from Ohio, she has trained in the US, New Zealand, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK. Through her research, she uses dance, gymnastics, contortion and robots in combination with brain scanning and training paradigms to explore how we learn and perceive complex actions and how experience shapes perception, throughout the lifespan and across cultures. Her primary research tools are functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), transcranial magnetic imaging (TMS), transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), reaction time measures, and behavioural training paradigms.

Emmanuel Espinasse (artist)

Emmanuel Espinasse is a French author, artist and illustrator. His multidisciplinary approach led him to work at the crossroad of comics and other disciplines and art scenes. Alone or within the artist collective In Wonder, he has created three-dimensional comics and installations meant to tell stories at human scale. He has also designed a number of digital comics, borrowing interactive principles from video games to produce experimental narratives. Simultaneously, he keeps on publishing illustrations and comics in magazines, underground zines and children's magazines.

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