Preschoolers' and adults' animism tendencies toward a humanoid robot

Abstract

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Unusual artifacts: Linking parents' STEM background and children's animacy judgments to parent–child play with robots

“…Prior work has investigated children's animacy judgments of robots and, to a lesser degree, how interacting with robots may inform children's thinking about robots. This earlier work suggests that children perceive robots as having properties indicative of membership in both animate and inanimate categories, and that experience with robots may shift children's reasoning (Jipson et al, 2016;Jipson & Gelman, 2007;Kahn Jr. & Shen, 2017;Okanda et al, 2021). We take…”

“…However, in a more traditional property projection task following this interaction, children largely rejected biological properties for the robot. Further, Okanda et al (2021) showed that young children's reasoning about a humanoid robot was impacted by interacting with it, such that 5-year-olds attributed more perceptual properties after interacting while still denying it life status. Thus, as opportunities to interact with robots become more common in the lives of children, we may find increasing flexibility in their reasoning.…”

How do children answer questions from a physically present humanoid robot?

“…Previous studies have indicated that 3‐year‐olds tend to confuse robots, both humanoid and dog‐like ones, with living things. They have been reported to be likely to attribute biological properties (e.g., eating and growing) to robots while this is not the case with 5‐year‐olds (e.g., Jipson & Gelman, 2007; Okanda et al, 2021). Unlike younger preschoolers, 5‐year‐olds did not attribute biological capacities to a humanoid robot even though they were likely to attribute other properties (e.g., psychological and perceptual ones) to it, especially when they had interacted with it (Okanda et al, 2021).…”

“…Some reported that 7‐ to 15‐year‐old children behaved similarly with a real dog and a robotic dog (Melson et al, 2009) and 3‐year‐old children attributed lifelike properties to robotic dogs (Jipson & Gelman, 2007; Jipson, Gülgöz, & Gelman, 2016). Moreover, 5‐year‐olds and adults attributed some lifelike properties to a humanoid robot, especially when they had briefly interacted with it (Okanda, Taniguchi, Wang, & Itakura, 2021). It is possible that children do not discriminate a humanoid robot from humans, at least in social situations.…”

Social Robots as Intentional Agents

“…In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the human tendency and ability to treat robots as intentional agents (Perez-Osorio & Wykowska, 2020;Schellen & Wykowska, 2019;Papagni & Koeszegi, 2021, see also Paper VI of this thesis for a systematic review of the empirical literature). Researchers have investigated some of the determinants of the human tendency to attribute intentional (and other mental) states to robots, including factors such as a person's age (Manzi et al, 2020;Okanda, Taniguchi, Wang, & Itakura, 2021), various motivational determinants (Waytz et al, 2010;Perez-Osorio, Marchesi, Ghiglino, Ince, & Wykowska, 2019;Złotowski et al, 2018), robot appearance (Martini, Gonzalez, & Wiese, 2016;Abubshait, Momen, & Wiese, 2020), and robot behavior (Wallkötter, Stower, Kappas, & Castellano, 2020;Abubshait & Wiese, 2017;Terada & Yamada, 2017). Other research focused on some of the effects of attributing intentional states, including trust in robots (Mou, Ruocco, Zanatto, & Cangelosi, 2020), social attention (Wiese, Wykowska, Zwickel, & Müller, 2012;Wykowska, Wiese, Prosser, & Müller, 2014), cognitive performance (Wiese, Mandell, Shaw, & Smith, 2019), and the abuse of robots (Keijsers & Bartneck, 2018), and on what types of intentional states (and other mental states) people ascribe to robots as compared to other agents, such as humans or computers (Levin, 3For example, nations are commonly referred to as wanting to reach an agreement or as believing that a potential enemy is planning an attack, and some have even been described as "autistic" on account of their limited interaction with other states (Buzan, 1993).…”