There is converging evidence that the observation of an action activates a corresponding motor representation in the observer through a 'mirror-matching' mechanism. However, research on such 'shared representations' of perception and action has widely neglected the question of how we can distinguish our own motor intentions from externally triggered motor representations. By investigating the i...

Polystyrene Petri dishes are in use in hundreds of thousands of laboratories world wide. Cell culture experiments performed in them provide fundamental information in a wide range of applications, including but not limited to testing novel biomaterials and pharmaceuticals, and stem cell research. These experiments cost billions of dollars per year. In this study we report on a potential deficie...

A major challenge in studying social behaviour stems from the need to disentangle the behaviour of each individual from the resulting collective. One way to overcome this problem is to construct a model of the behaviour of an individual, and observe whether combining many such individuals leads to the predicted outcome. This can be achieved by using robots. In this review we discuss the strengt...

A novel framework is presented that provides a formal operational description for characterising social decision making. It contributes explicit reasoning about the potential benefits of the individual agent, particular subgroups of agents or the overall system. This framework enables multi-farious social interaction attitudes to be identified and defined; ranging from the purely self-intereste...

Agents can be thought of as following a social behaviour, depending on the context in which they are interacting. We devise a computationally grounded mechanism to represent and reason about others in social terms, reflecting the local perspective of an agent (first-person view), to support both stereotypical and empathetic reasoning. We use a hierarchy of agent models to discriminate which beh...

The observed clustering, and shared underlying determinants, of risk behaviours in young people has led to the proposition that interventions should take a broader approach to risk behaviour prevention. In this review we synthesized the evidence on 'what works' to prevent multiple risk behaviour (focusing on tobacco, alcohol and illicit drug use and sexual risk behaviour) for policy-makers, pra...