A hermeneutical approach to provide robots with socially adaptive perception Carlo MAZZOLA a,b,1 , Sara INCAO b,c , Massimo MARASSI d , Francesco REA c , Alessandra SCIUTTI c a RBCS Unit – Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia – Italy b DIBRIS – Università di Genova – Italy c CONTACT Unit – Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia – Italy d Philosophy Dep – Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan – Italy Abstract. Adaptive behaviour is essential for robots to establish natural social interactions with humans, which is grounded and develops from an adaptive perception of the environment and the other agents. At the intersection of social and cognitive robotics, this paper theorises interpretation as a fundamental instrument to provide such skills to robots. First, the hermeneutical circle of context and experience is described as a core element of adaptivity in human perception. Secondarily, the process of interpretation/contextualisation is presented through two different but complementary levels. Finally, in a dialogue with the current developments in social robots, the paper brings to the attention some problems or possibilities on the topic. Keywords. Social Robotics, Adaptability, Personalisation, Shared Perception, Human-Robot Interaction 1. Introduction Social robotics is an expanding area of research. It is intrinsically interdisciplinary since the interest on the topic is distributed among social sciences, biomedical and robotic engineering, neurosciences, and philosophy and aims to develop and investigate natural interaction between humans and robots [1]. It shares part of the research with other specific areas of robotics, such as cognitive robotics. Cognitive robotics aims at autonomous development, modelling, and porting of cognitive abilities on embodied artificial systems [2]. The present work fits into the intersection between the two domains by reflecting on socially adaptive perception in robots and proposing a theoretical model about it. Adaptive behaviour has already been highlighted for robots as fundamental for establishing a natural social interaction [3,4]. However, adaptive behaviour develops from an adaptive perception of the environment and the other agents. Following this idea, the present research outlines a view of adaptive perception by focusing on two different 1 Corresponding Author: Carlo Mazzola; E-mail: carlo.mazzola@iit.it. This work has been supported by the transdisciplinary research project TECVAL - Tecnica e Valori dell'Umano (UCSC) D.3.2. 2018 of Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan) and by a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. G.A. No 804388, wHiSPER