Course Schedule

The following table contains the course meeting schedule with links to the readings. For course meetings where there is a required reading assignment, the following items are due by 10:00am the day of class:

More details on the expectations for the reading reflections, discussion leadership presentations, and final paper can be found on the assignments page.


The links I've provided for the readings will direct you to the official online proceedings or journal sites. If you're not able to view the entire paper or cannot download the PDF, I'd recommend searching for the paper on Google Scholar, where you can find an available PDF.


Date Meeting Type Meeting Lead(s) Topic Reading(s) or Tasks to Complete Beforehand
Tue, Sep 30 Lecture Sarah Sebo
Thu, Oct 2 Discussion Sarah Sebo Mental State Attribution to Robots Thellman et al. (2022)
Tue, Oct 7 Discussion Computers are Social Actors Nass et al. (1994)
Thu, Oct 9 Discussion Social Robots as Depictions of Social Agents Clark & Fischer (2023)
Tue, Oct 14 Discussion Mind Perception I Gray et al. (2007) and
Weisman et al. (2017)
Thu, Oct 16 Discussion Mind Perception II Tzelios et al. (2022) and
Malle (2019)
Tue, Oct 21 Discussion Anthropomorphism Epley et al. (2007)
Thu, Oct 23 Discussion Free Will and Consciousness Nahmias et al. (2019)
Tue, Oct 28 Discussion Robot Autonomy Kim et al. (2024)
Thu, Oct 30 Discussion Mental State Attributions to a Cheating Robot Short et al. (2010)
Tue, Nov 4 Discussion Children's Mental Attributions towards Robots and Machines Flanagan et al. (2023)
Thu, Nov 6 Guest Presentation Guest Presenter: Greg Trafton Trafton et al. (2024)
Tue, Nov 11 Discussion Robot Moral Responsibility Komatsu et al. (2021)
Thu, Nov 13 No Class
Tue, Nov 18 Presentations & Discussion Student Presentations & Discussion with Guest Dr. Nicholas Epley
Thu, Nov 20 Workshopping Workshop Final Paper Theories
Tue, Nov 25 Thanksgiving Break - No Class
Thu, Nov 27 Thanksgiving Break - No Class
Tue, Dec 2 Presentations
Thu, Dec 4 Presentations


Reading References

The following table includes the links to the course readings as well as their full bibliographic references.

Short Reference Bibliographic Reference
Clark & Fischer (2023) Clark, H. H., & Fischer, K. (2023). Social robots as depictions of social agents. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 46, e21.
Epley et al. (2007) Epley, N., Waytz, A., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2007). On seeing human: a three-factor theory of anthropomorphism. Psychological review, 114(4), 864.
Flanagan et al. (2023) Flanagan, T., Wong, G., & Kushnir, T. (2023). The minds of machines: Children's beliefs about the experiences, thoughts, and morals of familiar interactive technologies. Developmental psychology, 59(6), 1017.
Gray et al. (2007) Gray, H. M., Gray, K., & Wegner, D. M. (2007). Dimensions of mind perception. Science, 315(5812), 619-619.
Kim et al. (2024) Kim, S., Anthis, J. R., & Sebo, S. (2024). A taxonomy of robot autonomy for human-robot interaction. In Proceedings of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (pp. 381-393).
Komatsu et al. (2021) Komatsu, T., Malle, B. F., & Scheutz, M. (2021, March). Blaming the reluctant robot: Parallel blame judgments for robots in moral dilemmas across US and Japan. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM/IEEE international conference on human-robot interaction (pp. 63-72).
Malle (2019) Malle, B. F. (2019). How many dimensions of mind perception really are there?. In Proceedings of the annual meeting of the cognitive science society (Vol. 41).
Nahmias et al. (2019) Nahmias, E., Allen, C. H., & Loveall, B. (2019). When do robots have free will? Exploring the relationships between (attributions of) consciousness and free will. In Free will, causality, and neuroscience (pp. 57-80). Brill.
Nass et al. (1994) Nass, C., Steuer, J., & Tauber, E. R. (1994, April). Computers are social actors. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 72-78).
Short et al. (2010) Short, E., Hart, J., Vu, M., & Scassellati, B. (2010). No fair!! an interaction with a cheating robot. In 2010 5th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) (pp. 219-226). IEEE.
Thellman et al. (2022) Thellman, S., De Graaf, M., & Ziemke, T. (2022). Mental state attribution to robots: A systematic review of conceptions, methods, and findings. ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (THRI), 11(4), 1-51.
Trafton et al. (2024) Trafton, J. G., McCurry, J. M., Zish, K., & Frazier, C. R. (2024). The perception of agency. ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction, 13(1), 1-23.
Tzelios et al. (2022) Tzelios, K., Williams, L. A., Omerod, J., & Bliss-Moreau, E. (2022). Evidence of the unidimensional structure of mind perception. Scientific Reports, 12(1), 18978.
Weisman et al. (2017) Weisman, K., Dweck, C. S., & Markman, E. M. (2017). Rethinking people's conceptions of mental life. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(43), 11374-11379.