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Aim of the study was to investigate the cognitive processes involved and stimulated by educational robotics (LEGO® robots and Kodu Game Lab) in lower secondary school students. Results showed that LEGO® and KGL artifacts involve specific cognitive and academic skills. In particular the use of LEGO® is related to deductive reasoning, speed of processing visual targets, reading comprehension and geometrical problem solving; the use of KGL is related to visual-spatial working memory, updating skills and reading comprehension. Both technologies, moreover, are effective in the improvement of visual-spatial working memory. Implications for Human-Robot Interaction and BICA challenge are discussed.

In this paper we illustrate a humanoid robot able to interact socially and naturally with a human by expressing human-like body emotions. The emotional architecture of this robot is based on an emotional conceptual space generated using the paradigm of Latent Semantic Analysis. The robot generates its overall affective behavior (Latent Semantic Behavior) taking into account the visual and phrasal stimuli of human user, the environment and its personality, all encoded in his emotional conceptual space. The robot determines its emotion according by all these parameters that influence and orient the generation of his behavior not predictable from the user. The goal of this approach is to obtain an affinity matching with humans. The robot exhibit a smoothly natural transition in his emotion changes during the interaction with humans taking also into account the previous generated emotions. To validate the system, we implemented the distribute system on an Aldebaran NAO small humanoid robot and on a Android Phone HTC and we tested this social emotional interaction using the phone device as intelligent interface between human and robot in a complex scenario.

In this paper we illustrate a new version of the cognitive architecture of an emotional humanoid robot based on the proposed paradigm of Latent Semantic Behaviour (LSB). This paradigm is a step towards the simulation of an emotional behavior of a robot interacting with humans. The New Architecture uses a different procedure of induction of the emotional conceptual space and an Android mobile phone as user-friendly for the emotional interaction with robot. The robot generates its overall behavior also taking into account its "personality" encoded in the emotional conceptual space. To validate the system, we implemented the distribute system on a Aldebaran NAO humanoid robot and on a Android Phone HTC and we tested this new emotional interaction between human and robot through the use of a phone.