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Abstract-The purpose of this study was to examine how children think about and attribute features of friendship to a robot after a brief interaction with one. Children visiting a science centre located in a major Western Canadian city were randomly selected to participate in an experiment set up at the centre. A total of 184 children ages 5 to 16 years (M = 8.18 years) with an approximate even number of boys and girls participated. Children were interviewed after observing a traditional robot, a small 5 degree of freedom robot arm, perform a block stacking task. Content analysis was used to examine responses to nine open-ended questions. Results indicate that the majority of children were willing to engage in friendship with the robot by showing positive affiliation and social support towards it, as well as sharing activities, and communicating with it.Significant sex differences in how children ascribe characteristics of friendship to a robot were also found. Because of the increase in computer access among youth, studies have investigated the implications of this usage on their physical and psychological well-being [3][4][5]. Results are mixed with studies documenting adverse and positive outcomes, as well as no effects [6][7][8]. While it remains unclear as to how computer use is related to children's social development, research has also to examine how children's interactions with robots affect their development. With robots being built to mimic human expression and behavior it is possible that when children interact with a robot they may develop feelings of friendship towards it. The development of friendships in childhood is crucial to subsequent mental and physical health [9- II. RELATED WORK A. Human-Robot interactionsIn recent years, the course of development of robots has moved away from creating machines to work independently from humans to now creating robots for the purposes of interacting with humans in daily life [12]. In today's society, some robots function as physical aids for elderly people [13], as museum tour guides [14,15], or as peer tutors and educational tools [16,17]. With such a trend toward social robots, questions arise as to the extent of children's knowledge and understanding of humanistic versus robotic characteristics and how this may impact children's social relationships. According to Turkle [18] children who regularly use electronic devices (e.g., computers, video games, electronic toys) are more likely to attribute psychological characteristics to such devices, such as having the ability to talk, sing, or do activities. A recent study by Melson and colleagues [19] examined children's understanding of robotic versus living animals by comparing Sony's AIBO robotic dog to a living dog. The authors found that although more children (aged 7 to 15 years) attributed physical characteristics (i.e., mental states, sociality, and moral standing) to the live dog, the majority of children also ascribed these attributes to the robotic dog. In addition, children were as likely to give co...

Just as human-human behavior and interactions are important to study, human-robot interactions will take more prominence in the near future. These interactions will not only be in one direction, robots helping humans, but they will also be bidirectional with humans helping robots. This study examined the interactions between children and robots by observing whether children help a robot complete a task, and the contexts which elicited the most help. Five studies were conducted each consisting of 20 or more children per group with an approximate even number of boys and girls. Visitors to a science centre located in a major Western Canadian city were invited to participate in an experiment set up at the centre. Their behaviors with a robot, a small 5 degree of freedom robot arm programmed with a set of predefined tasks which could be selected during the experiments, were observed. Results of chi-square analyses indicated that children are most likely to help a robot after experiencing a positive introduction to it, X 2 (1) = 4.15, p = .04. Moreover, a positive introduction in combination with permission to help resulted in the vast majority (70%) of children helping. These results suggest that adult instructions about a robot impact children's perceptions and helping behaviors towards it. The generalizability of these results to children's helping behaviors towards people is also discussed.

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Industrial Mail Surveys: The Costs and Benefits of Telephone Pre-notificationOver the past 5 years a trend towards increased usage of mail surveys has been identified and the reasons for this as well as the advantages of mail surveys are discussed. Low response rates form the major disadvantage of the technique and advantages of prenotification which can help to increase response rates are discussed. A limited number of studies exist on the effect of prenotification and its associated costs and benefits. This paper reports the results of an experimental study on telephone prenotification within the industrial sector (n = 235). Results showed that a significantly higher (14%) response rate was achieved when individuals were pre-notified, but there was no significant difference between the groups which were contacted directly and indirectly. Time of day and day of week had no significant effect on the success of pre-contacting. Return times were shortest for the group contacted directly and longest for the control group, but not significantly so. A call duration of around 6 minutes appeared to give the highest probability of response. A cost increase of over 100% per return was associated with the telephone pre-notification technique. The paper offers practical advice to researchers planning an industrial mail survey.