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About

Galit Hofree is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of social neuroscience, human-robot interaction, and embodied cognition. Her work fundamentally explores how humans perceive, mimic, and emotionally respond to artificial agents—particularly androids and robots—shedding light on the neural and behavioral underpinnings of social connection. Hofree’s most influential study, "Bridging the Mechanical and the Human Mind" (2014, 60 citations), demonstrated that people spontaneously mimic the facial expressions of a physically present android, revealing that even rudimentary empathy can be triggered by non-human entities. This finding challenged traditional views of social mimicry as uniquely human-to-human. In subsequent work (2015, 37 citations), she used EMG to show that action observation and imitation occur for both human and robotic agents, supporting embodied simulation theories. Her 2018 paper (19 citations) further refined this view, showing that in competitive social contexts, people do not mirror an android’s expressions but instead react to their informational value—highlighting the role of context in social cognition. Hofree’s contributions bridge robotics and psychology, offering critical insights for designing socially intelligent machines and understanding atypical social processing. Her work has been cited over 120 times, influencing fields from social robotics to clinical neuroscience.