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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
This may be reflected within a single question, or reflected through status incongruency across multiple questions.
- 2.
398 questions were asked in total, if duplicates are counted. Common duplicates included questions on Zeno’s age, family, and abilities.
- 3.
Given the nine tests run we consider a significant result to occur at p = .006.
References
Opfer, J.E., Gelman, S.A.: Development of the animate-inanimate distinction. In: The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Cognitive Development, pp. 213–238 (2010)
Sharkey, A., Sharkey, N.: Children, the elderly, and interactive robots. IEEE Robot. Autom. Mag. 18, 32–38 (2011)
Piaget, J.: The Child’s Conception of the World. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham (1951)
Carey, S.: Conceptual Change in Childhood. The MIT Press, Cambridge (1985)
Bartneck, C., Kanda, T., Mubin, O., Al Mahmud, A.: Does the design of a robot influence its animacy and perceived intelligence? Int. J. Soc. Robot 1, 195–204 (2009)
Somanader, M.C., Saylor, M.M., Levin, D.T.: Remote control and childrens under-standing of robots. J. Exp. Child Psychol. 109, 239–247 (2011)
Kahn Jr., P.H., Friedman, B., Perez-Granados, D.R., Freier, N.G.: Robotic pets in the lives of preschool children. Interact. Stud. 7(3), 405–436 (2006)
Okita, S.Y., Schwartz, D.L.: Young children’s understanding of animacy and entertainment robots. Int. J. Humanoid Robot 3, 393–412 (2006)
Cameron, D., Fernando, S., Millings, A., Szollosy, M., Collins, E., Moore, R., Sharkey, A., Prescott, T.: Designing robot personalities for human-robot symbiotic interaction in an educational context. In: Lepora, N.F.F., Mura, A., Mangan, M., Verschure, P.F.M.J., Desmulliez, M., Prescott, T.J.J. (eds.) Living Machines 2016. LNCS, vol. 9793, pp. 413–417. Springer, Cham (2016). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-42417-0_39
Kahn, P., Reichert, A., Gary, H., Kanda, T., Ishiguro, H., Shen, S., Ruckert, J.H., Gill, B.: The new ontological category hypothesis in human-robot interaction. In: 6th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), pp. 159–160. IEEE (2011)
Cameron, D., Fernando, S., Millings, A., Moore, R., Sharkey, A., Prescott, T.: Children’s age influences their perceptions of a humanoid robot as being like a person or machine. In: Wilson, S.P., Verschure, P.F.M.J., Mura, A., Prescott, T.J. (eds.) Living Machines 2015. LNCS, vol. 9222, pp. 348–353. Springer, Cham (2015). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-22979-9_34
Hanson, D., Baurmann, S., Riccio, T., Margolin, R., Dockins, T., Tavares, M., Carpenter, K.: Zeno: a cognitive character. AI Magazine, pp. 9–11 (2009)
Cameron, D., Fernando, S., Millings, A., Szollosy, M., Collins, E.C., Moore, R., Sharkey, A., Prescott, T.: Congratulations, its a boy! Bench-marking childrens perceptions of the Robokind Zeno-R25. In: 17th Proceedings of Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems, pp. 33–39 (2016). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-40379-3_4
Cameron, D., Fernando, S., Collins, E.C., Szollosy, M., Millings, A., Moore, R., Sharkey, A., Prescott, T.: You made him be alive: children’s perceptions of animacy in a humanoid robot. In: Mangan, M., Cutkosky, M., Mura, A., Verschure, P.F.M.J., Prescott, T., Lepora, N. (eds.) Living Machines 2017. LNAI, vol. 10384 Springer, Cham (2017). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-63537-8_7
Kahn Jr., P.H., Kanda, T., Ishiguro, H., Freier, N.G., Severson, R.L., Gill, B.T., Ruckert, J.H., Shen, S.: Robovie, you’ll have to go into the closet now: children’s social and moral relationships with a humanoid robot. Dev. Psychol. 48, 303 (2012)
Reidsma, D., et al.: The EASEL project: towards educational human-robot symbiotic interaction. In: Lepora, N.F.F., Mura, A., Mangan, M., Verschure, P.F.M.J., Desmulliez, M., Prescott, T.J.J. (eds.) Living Machines 2016. LNCS, vol. 9793, pp. 297–306. Springer, Cham (2016). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-42417-0_27
Vouloutsi, V., et al.: Towards a synthetic tutor assistant: The EASEL Project and its architecture. In: Lepora, N.F.F., Mura, A., Mangan, M., Verschure, P.F.M.J., Desmulliez, M., Prescott, T.J.J. (eds.) Living Machines 2016. LNCS, vol. 9793, pp. 353–364. Springer, Cham (2016). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-42417-0_32
Cameron, D., Fernando, S., Collins, E.C., Millings, A., Moore, R.K., Sharkey, A., Evers, V., Prescott, T.: Presence of life-like robot expressions influences children’s enjoyment of human-robot interactions in the field. In: 4th International Symposium on New Frontiers in Human-Robot Interaction, pp. 36–41 (2015)
Fernando, S., Moore, R.K., Cameron, D., Collins, E.C., Millings, A., Sharkey, A.J., Prescott, T.J.: Automatic recognition of child speech for robotic applications in noisy environments. arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.02695 (2016)
Kahn Jr, P.H., Friedman, B., Perez-Granados, D.R., Freier, N.G.: Robotic pets in the lives of preschool children. Interact. Stud. 7, 405–436 (2006)
Collins, W.A., Nurius, P.S.: Self-understanding and self-regulation in middle childhood. In: Collins, W.A. (ed.) Development During Middle Childhood: The Years From Six to Twelve. National Research Council (1984)
Cameron, D., Aitken, J., Collins, E., Boorman, L., Fernando, S., McAree, O., Martinez-Hernandez, U., Law, J.: Framing factors: the importance of context and the individual in understanding trust in human-robot interaction. In: 2015 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) (2015)
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-ICT-2013-10) under grant agreement no. 611971 Emily Cowles-Naja and Abigail Perkins were funded through the University of Sheffield SURE scheme.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Cameron, D. et al. (2017). Children’s Age Influences Their Use of Biological and Mechanical Questions Towards a Humanoid. In: Gao, Y., Fallah, S., Jin, Y., Lekakou, C. (eds) Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems. TAROS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10454. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64107-2_23
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64107-2_23
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-64106-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-64107-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)