Do children perceive robots as alive? Children's attributions of human characteristics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Centuries ago, the existence of life was explained by the presence of a soul [1]. Known as animism, this term was re-defined in the 1970s by Piaget as young children's beliefs that inanimate objects are capable of actions and have lifelike qualities. With the development of robots in the 21 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">st</sup> century, researchers have yet to examine whether animism is apparent in children's impressions of robots. The purpose of this study was to examine children's perspectives about the cognitive, affective, and behavioral attributes of a robot. Visitors to a science centre located in a major Western Canadian city were invited to participate in an experiment set up at the centre. A total of 198 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 robot, a small 5 degree of freedom robot arm, perform a block stacking task. Answers to the six questions about the robot were scored according to whether they referenced humanistic qualities. Frequency and content analysis results suggest that a significant proportion of children ascribe cognitive, affective, and behavioral characteristics to robots.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".