Children's Cognitive and Behavioral Reactions to an Autonomous Versus Controlled Social Robot Dog

Research Findings: Interactive technology has become ubiquitous in young children's lives, but little is known about how children incorporate such technologies into their intuitive biological theories. Here we explore how the manner in which technology is introduced to young children impacts their biological reasoning, moral regard, and prosocial behavior toward it. We asked 5-and 7-year-old children to interact with a robot dog that was described either as moving autonomously or as remote controlled. Compared with a controlled robot, the autonomous robot caused children to ascribe higher emotional and physical sentience to the robot, to reference the robot as having desires and physiological states, and to reference moral concerns as applying to the robot. Children who owned a dog at home were more likely to behave prosocially toward the autonomous robot than those who did not. Practice or Policy: Recent work has begun to use robots as learning tools. Our results suggest that the manner in which robots are introduced to young children may differentially impact children's learning. Presenting robots as autonomous agents may help promote children's social-emotional development, whereas presenting robots as human controlled may help promote robots as purely cognitive educational tools.