About this session

Thursday, 1:40 PM - 3:10 PM

Children’s social and cognitive interactions with robots: Trust, learning, and theory of mind

Interactive robots are increasingly present in children’s environments, such as serving as tour guides in museums or learning companions in educational settings. This raises important questions about how children navigate their interactions with these non-human entities. Do children distinguish between robots and humans when attributing knowledge or mental capacities? Does the appearance of social robots (e.g., human-like, animal-like, or machine-like) influence these interactions? How should we use social robots to maximize educational outcomes in children? This symposium explores these questions by examining the complex ways in which children engage with robots, focusing on processes such as selective trust, learning effectiveness, and mind attribution. The first study examined 3- to 6-year-old children’s selective trust judgments when choosing between paired robot and human informants whose reliability varied. The results indicate a developmental difference: While 3-year-olds always overtrust human informants, older children prefer the more reliable informants, whether human or robot. The second study investigated the influence of a robot tutor’s appearance (human-like or animal-like) on teaching human or animal knowledge to 5-year-olds, finding that matching the robot's appearance to the learning context improved educational outcomes. The third study explored whether 4- and 5-year-olds attribute mental capacities to robots (human-like or not). This work addresses children’s theory of mind and the limits of attributing human-like minds to non-human entities. Together, this symposium sheds light on how children’s interactions with robots are shaped by developmental stages, robot appearance, and the tendency to anthropomorphize. The broader impact of human-robot interactions on children’s development will be discussed.

Paper #1
Title	Shall I trust the robot? Children’s selective trust in the human-robot comparisons
Presenting author	Dr. Wei Deng, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China

Paper #2
Title	The contextual relevance hypothesis: How robot appearance influences children’s trust and learning across knowledge domains
Presenting author	Xiaoqian Li, Ph.D., Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore

Paper #3
Title	Children’s mental state attribution to humanoid and non-humanoid robots across theory of mind measures
Presenting author	Dr. Elizabeth Jessica Goldman, Ph.D., Yeshiva University, USA

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Session chairs
Xiaoqian Li, Ph.D., Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore; W. Quin Yow, Ph.D., , Singapore

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