Young children's understanding of animacy and entertainment robots

Complex interactions, biologically-inspired features and intelligence are increasingly seen in entertainment robots. Do these features affect how children interpret robots? Children have "animistic intuitions" that they use to attribute intelligence, biology, and agency to living things. Two studies explore whether young children also apply animistic intuitions to robotic animals, and whether attributes vary by the child's age, robot behavior and appearance. A total of ninety-three three- to five-year-olds participated in two experiments. They observed or interacted with robots that exhibited different behaviors and levels of responsiveness to their environment. They then answered simple questions that probed their attributions of biology, intelligence, and agency. The results indicated that regardless of the robots' look and behavior, younger children over-generalized their animistic intuitions about real animals and older children attributed some animistic qualities but not others. One implication is that young children's criteria and attributions do not depend on robot features that are important for older children and adults. Another implication is that children do not have a theory of aliveness, and they develop the category of robot slowly and piecemeal as they learn discrete facts about how technology differs from living things.