Abstract
Children, in their everyday lives, encounter several types of humanoid robots. The purpose of this study was to investigate children’s folk knowledge of robots using the card-choice task. In the task, both adults and five- and six-year-old children were given nine questions concerning the biological and psychological properties of robots. They were asked to choose the appropriate stimuli from among five objects including living things, nonliving things, and a robot. The results revealed that the children tended to attribute certain biological properties to the robot. These results accorded with previous results. However, in our study, contrary to previous such studies, even older children showed such a tendency. Moreover, the children were unable to choose all the cards in the same way as the adults. Thus, it can be concluded that children’s knowledge of robots is incomplete. And the children’s knowledge is changed by method.
Highlights
This study is considered valuable because it focused on young children’s knowledge of robots
The robot used in this study was a humanoid robot named Robovie (Figure 1)
In the case of the children who did not respond to the name of each stimulus, most of them were unable to provide the name of the object such as “refrigerator” or “robot.” a refrigerator is a common electronic item, the photograph of the refrigerator was not suitable
Summary
This study is considered valuable because it focused on young children’s knowledge of robots. Doglin and Behrend (1985) investigated children’s animistic judgement on non living things using various stimuli. Richards and Siegler (1984) presented findings that children’s life judgment changed with the questions put forward by the experimenter. In their study, they asked children (four- to nine-year-olds) a question that emphasized the motion state of each stimulus. The children tended to use motion information to determine the living things In view of these results, it was necessary to investigate children’s judgment of robots by a method different from that of Jipson and Gelman (2007). If children have a clear knowledge of robots, they would not be influenced by other stimuli or the experimenters’ questions
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