This paper describes an ongoing interdisciplinary collaboration between robotics and human cognitive neuroscience research. We argue such research is beneficial to both disciplines and can be viewed a win-win. Not only it is important to understand the human factors in human-robot interaction, collaborations with robotics can also help cognitive scientists answer questions about human brain and behavior, and take steps toward understanding how the human brain enables some of our most important skills such as action understanding, social cognition, empathy, and communication.