Francesca Cocchella
Papers
10
Total Citations
69
H-Index
5
About
Francesca Cocchella is a cognitive scientist and human-robot interaction researcher whose work explores how people perceive, trust, and interact with social robots. Her research sits at the intersection of cognitive psychology, social robotics, and explainable AI, with a focus on anthropomorphism—the tendency to attribute human-like qualities to robots. In her most cited work (28 citations), she used the inversion paradigm to demonstrate that people cognitively process humanoid robot faces differently from objects, revealing a nuanced form of cognitive anthropomorphism. Cocchella has also investigated how social robots influence group dynamics, including exclusion scenarios, and how explainable AI can enhance human-robot teaming in complex tasks like playing Connect 4. Her applied work includes training school teachers to use robots as educational tools and studying children’s perceptions of robots in classroom settings. With a growing portfolio of over 60 citations, Cocchella is contributing to the design of more socially intelligent, transparent, and trustworthy robots. She has also co-organized the cAESAR workshop on adapted interaction with social robots, helping shape the field’s future directions.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Human- or object-like? Cognitive anthropomorphism of humanoid robots28 citations · 2022
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- 3What if a Social Robot Excluded You?8 citations · 2023
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- 106th Workshop on Adapted intEraction with SociAl Robots (cAESAR)1 citations · 2025