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About

Catharina V. Smedegaard is a leading voice in Social Human-Robot Interaction (SHRI), where her work fundamentally rethinks how we study and understand novelty in human-robot encounters. Her core research investigates psychological novelty effects—the initial fascination and subsequent habituation that occur when people meet social robots. Rather than treating novelty as mere noise or a confounding variable to be controlled, Smedegaard’s landmark 2019 paper, “Reframing the Role of Novelty within Social HRI: from Noise to Information” (92 citations), argues that novelty itself is a rich source of data about how people perceive and conceptualize robots. She extends this argument in her 2022 work, “Novelty Knows No Boundaries” (26 citations), calling for a more pluralistic, interdisciplinary approach to studying novelty effects across the field. Smedegaard also developed innovative methodologies, such as the three-word assessment technique explored in her 2019 paper (9 citations), which captures immediate, unfiltered impressions of social robots like the Telenoid R1. Her contributions are reshaping how researchers design longitudinal studies, interpret user feedback, and ultimately build robots that can sustain meaningful social engagement beyond the first encounter.