Children’s Age Influences Their Use of Biological and Mechanical Questions Towards a Humanoid

Abstract

ReuseUnless indicated otherwise, fulltext items are protected by copyright with all rights reserved. The copyright exception in section 29 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 allows the making of a single copy solely for the purpose of non-commercial research or private study within the limits of fair dealing. The publisher or other rights-holder may allow further reproduction and re-use of this version -refer to the White Rose Research Online record for this item. Where records identify the publisher as the copyright holder, users can verify any specific terms of use on the publisher's website. TakedownIf you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing eprints@whiterose.ac.uk including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request.Children's age influences their use of biological and mechanical questions towards a humanoid Abstract. Complex autonomous interactions, biomimetic appearances, and responsive behaviours are increasingly seen in social robots. These features, by design or otherwise, may substantially influence young children's beliefs of a robot's animacy. Young children are believed to hold naive theories of animacy, and can miscategorise objects as living agents with intentions; however, this develops with age to a biological understanding. Prior research indicates that children frequently categorise a responsive humanoid as being a hybrid of person and machine; although, with age, children tend towards classifying the humanoid as being more machine-like. Our current research explores this phenomenon, using an unobtrusive method: recording childrens conversational interaction with the humanoid and classifying indications of animacy beliefs in childrens questions asked. Our results indicate that established findings are not an artefact of prior research methods: young children tend to converse with the humanoid as if it is more animate than older children do.

Alexa, What Are You? Exploring Primary School Children’s Ontological Perceptions of Digital Voice Assistants in Open Interactions

“…Some of the youngest children in our sample with limited external or even no prior DVA exposure (i.e., subgroup 2.1) also displayed very different interaction patterns and ontological perceptions compared to the older children. This is in line with previous research arguing that age (Cameron et al, 2017;Druga et al, 2017;Brink, Gray, & Wellman, 2019;Kim et al, 2019) or the degree and length of technological exposure (Bernstein & Crowley, 2008;Kory-Westlund & Breazeal, 2019) are important factors when it comes to children's interactions with, and perceptions of, intelligently behaving machines.…”

Robotic - Cognitive Adaptive System for Teaching and Learning (R-CASTLE)

“…Speech recognition in noisy environments [18] and audiovisual scene analyzer [19], dialog and behavior planning [20] and dialog handler and behavior adapter [21], content and behavior generation using a Zeno [22] robot, and a FACE [23] robot compose the EASEL modules. The user-centered studies involve the children perceptions in relation to the robot [24], how children play with different robot shapes [25], how different games change the type of interaction [26], how children adopt different behaviors in symbiotic cooperation tasks [27], and how to model personalities in robots for symbiotic interaction in the educational context [28]. However, this proposal does not allow people from outside the project to design the interactions, and it does not provide accurate reports about the users' accomplishments after the interactions.…”