Young Children Treat Robots as Informants
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Breazeal-RobotInformant-TICS.pdf
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Author(s) • • • • •
Harris, Paul L.
DeSteno, David
Dickens, Leah
Kory Westlund, Jacqueline Marie
Jeong, Sooyeon
Breazeal, Cynthia Lynn
Date Issued
April 2016
Journal
Topics in Cognitive Science
Publisher
Wiley Blackwell
Citation
Breazeal, Cynthia; Harris, Paul L.; DeSteno, David; Kory Westlund, Jacqueline M.; Dickens, Leah and Jeong, Sooyeon. “Young Children Treat Robots as Informants.” Topics in Cognitive Science 8, no. 2 (March 4, 2016): 481–491. © 2016 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.
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Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Children ranging from 3 to 5 years were introduced to two anthropomorphic robots that provided them with information about unfamiliar animals. Children treated the robots as interlocutors. They supplied information to the robots and retained what the robots told them. Children also treated the robots as informants from whom they could seek information. Consistent with studies of children's early sensitivity to an interlocutor's non-verbal signals, children were especially attentive and receptive to whichever robot displayed the greater non-verbal contingency. Such selective information seeking is consistent with recent findings showing that although young children learn from others, they are selective with respect to the informants that they question or endorse.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12192