This talk will explore representational alignment in interacting systems in social robot studies and language technologies. The first part will present robots such as the child-friendly Opie robot in a study with children teaching colour names to the robot which had a distinctly different colour space; robot-robot language creation; and the rat-sized iRat robot, modelling SLAM in rodent navigation systems which unexpectedly led to prosocial tasks with rats. The second part will present a computer scientist’s take on how computational representations relate to classical data structures and algorithms; how they differ from biological representations; compare embeddings in artificial NNs with human memory. The talk will finish with open challenges from human cognition, including active construction of task-based representations in analogies and social interactions.