Link to bioRxiv paper: http://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2020.10.21.345876v1?rss=1 Authors: Belkaid, M., Kompatsiari, K., de Tommaso, D., Zablith, I., Wykowska, A. Abstract: In most everyday life situations, the brain needs to engage not only in making decisions, but also in anticipating and predicting the behavior of others. In such contexts, gaze can be highly informative about others' intentions, goals and upcoming decisions. Here, we investigated whether a humanoid robot's gaze (mutual or averted) influences the way people strategically reason in a social decision-making context. Specifically, participants played a strategic game with the robot iCub while we measured their behavior and neural (EEG) activity. Participants were slower to respond when iCub established mutual gaze prior to their decision, relative to averted gaze. This was associated with a higher decision threshold in the drift diffusion model and accompanied by more synchronized EEG alpha activity. In addition, we found that participants reasoned about the robot's actions in both conditions. However, those who mostly experienced the averted gaze were more likely to adopt a self-oriented strategy and their neural activity showed higher sensitivity to outcome. Altogether, these findings suggest that robot gaze acts as a strong social signal for humans, modulating response times, decision threshold, neural synchronization, as well as choice strategies and sensitivity outcomes. This has strong implications for all contexts involving human-robot interaction, from robotics to clinical applications. Copy rights belong to original authors. Visit the link for more info