About this session

Saturday, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Children and their (imperfect) bots: New evidence for children’s judgments of technologies and its limitations.

Children’s lives are increasingly being intertwined with interactive technologies. These technologies are incorporated into children’s learning (Belpaeme et al., 2018), social lives (Hoffman et al., 2021), and play (Aguiar, 2021). Though children accept these technologies as useful agents and tools (Harber & Corriveau, 2023; Severson & Carlson, 2010), there is still much to learn about what children think of these emerging technologies, particularly how children respond to technologies’ limitations. Here we present three papers exploring new insights into children’s technology engagement, using three distinct technologies in children’s lives – AI, robots, and smart speakers.
Paper 1 presents novel research exploring children’s judgments of AI models, demonstrating that 5-12-year-old children are less fearful of AI after interacting with it and engage in more exploratory behavior with visual-based AI (e.g., DALL-E) compared to text-based (e.g., ChatGPT). Paper 2 shows that 4-7-year-old children are willing to collaborate with a humanoid robot and will even maintain collaboration when the robot messes up, but only if the robot signals prosocial qualities. Paper 3 demonstrates that 5-12-year-old children’s ability to distinguish between a smart speaker that gives an unsatisfactory, but appropriate, answer from one that gives an exact, but inaccurate, answer changes with age and knowledge domain. These papers show that children are forming sophisticated beliefs about various technologies, particularly regarding technologies’ limitations. An expert in social-cognitive development will discuss the studies implications for future research on child-technology interaction and social development more broadly.

Paper #1
Title	How Children Understand AI: Children's Mental Models of Visual and Text Based Generative AI Models
Presenting author	Eliza Kosoy, UC Berkeley, United States

Paper #2
Title	Children's persistence and collaboration with mistaken robots.
Presenting author	Dr. Teresa Flanagan, University of Chicago, United States

Paper #3
Title	Virtuous Ignorance in the Technological Era: Children’s Intuitions about Smart Speaker Knowledge.
Presenting author	Dr. Lauren Girouard-Hallam, University of Michigan, United States

View all paper details

Session chair
Dr. Teresa Flanagan, University of Chicago, United States

Discussant
Dr. Gail D. Heyman, Ph.D., UC San Diego, United States

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