Could social robots facilitate children with autism spectrum disorders in learning distrust and deception?

Yaoxin Zhang,Wenxu Song,Zhenlin Tan,Huilin Zhu,Yuyin Wang,Cheuk Man Lam,Yifang Weng,Sio Pan Hoi,Haoyang Lu,Bella Siu Man Chan,Jiajia Chen,Li Yi

doi:10.1016/j.chb.2019.04.008

Abstract

Social robots have been increasingly involved in our daily lives and provide a new environment for children's growth. The current study aimed to examine how children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) learned complex social rules from a social robot through distrust and deception games. Twenty children with ASD between the ages of 5–8 and 20 typically-developing (TD) peers whose age and IQ were matched participated in distrust and deception tasks along with an interview about their perception of the human-likeness of the robot. The results demonstrated that: 1) children with ASD were slower to learn to and less likely to distrust and deceive a social robot than TD children and 2) children with ASD who perceived the robot to appear more human-like had more difficulty in learning to distrust the robot. Besides, by comparing to a previous study the results showed that children with ASD appeared to have more difficulty in learning to distrust a human compared to a robot, particularly in the early phase of learning. Overall, our study verified that social robots could facilitate children with ASD's learning of some social rules and showed that children's perception of the robot plays an important role in their social learning, which provides insights on robot design and its clinical applications in ASD intervention.

Highlights

Social robots have been increasingly involved in our daily lives and provide a new environment for children's growth
typically developing (TD) children were more likely than children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to distrust the robot who offered incorrect information
Results indicated that the TD group demonstrated a sharp downward trend: 85% began to distrust before the third trial, and all TD children successfully passed the task after 10 trials

Summary

Introduction

Social robots have been increasingly involved in our daily lives and provide a new environment for children's growth. Preschoolers gradually acquire more complicated information and learn to process and identify it within a more expansive social milieu (e.g., Lee & Cameron, 2000), and learn to evaluate whether informants deserve trust on the basis of various factors, such as their past reliability, intentions, and past deceiving behaviors (e.g., Corriveau & Harris, 2009; Koenig & Harris, 2005; Vanderbilt, Liu, & Heyman, 2011) Not until they reach 4–5 years old do children develop skepticism towards others' testimony and selective trust, which can help them to identify reliable sources of information and foster their knowledge learning (Vanderbilt et al, 2011). Evidence comes from the recent finding that learning to deceive in a four-day training program could enhance preschoolers' Theory of Mind (ToM) and executive function (Ding et al, 2018)

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