Hiroyuki Yano

National Institute of Information and Communications Technology

Papers

Total Citations

226

H-Index

About

Hiroyuki Yano is a pioneering researcher in developmental robotics and human-robot interaction, with a focus on building machines that learn social intelligence from the ground up. His landmark work, "A Robot that Learns to Communicate with Human Caregivers" (125 citations), introduced the infant-like humanoid robot Infanoid, proposing an epigenetic model of social intelligence—how a robot can acquire communication skills through embodied interaction, much like a human infant. Yano further explored the foundations of social bonding in "Can a robot empathize with people?" (67 citations), and in "Attention coupling as a prerequisite for social interaction" (34 citations), he established attention coupling—the spatio-temporal coordination of mutual focus—as a critical prerequisite for meaningful human-robot social exchange. By implementing these mechanisms, Yano demonstrated how robots can learn to share attention and even evoke mental state attribution from human partners. His work bridges cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and robotics, offering profound insights into the origins of social cognition and the design of robots that can genuinely participate in human social activities.