Children’s attribution of mental states to humans and social robots assessed with the Theory of Mind Scale
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The present work examined children's attribution of psychological properties to inanimate agents in two experiments. In Study 1, an Interview Task and the Theory of Mind Scale (ToM Scale) were administered to 4-year-olds with either a human or a humanoid robot (NAO) protagonist. Parents also completed the Children's Social Understanding Scale (CSUS) to assess children's Theory of Mind skills. Overall, children performed similarly on the Interview and the ToM Scale. Theory of Mind skills (CSUS) did not predict performance on either task (ToM Scale or Interview). In Study 2, 5-year-olds were tested with figurines of different humanoid robots for the ToM Scale. Additionally, a Property Projection Task assessed biological, psychological, sensory, and artifact attributions to people, robots, animals, and artifacts. The results indicated that children attributed mental states similarly to the robots and the humans in the ToM Scale but did not anthropomorphize the robots in the Property Projection Task. In contrast to Study 1, the parental measure of children's ToM skills (CSUS) predicted performance on the ToM Scale in the Human Condition. Overall, the present findings indicate that mentalizing is generalized to humanoid robots by preschoolers, particularly when child-friendly scenarios are used.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
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".