Could social robots facilitate children with autism spectrum disorders in learning distrust and deception?

Abstract Social robots have been increasingly involved in our daily lives and provide a new environment for children's growth. The current study aimed to examine how children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) learned complex social rules from a social robot through distrust and deception games. Twenty children with ASD between the ages of 5–8 and 20 typically-developing (TD) peers whose age and IQ were matched participated in distrust and deception tasks along with an interview about their perception of the human-likeness of the robot. The results demonstrated that: 1) children with ASD were slower to learn to and less likely to distrust and deceive a social robot than TD children and 2) children with ASD who perceived the robot to appear more human-like had more difficulty in learning to distrust the robot. Besides, by comparing to a previous study the results showed that children with ASD appeared to have more difficulty in learning to distrust a human compared to a robot, particularly in the early phase of learning. Overall, our study verified that social robots could facilitate children with ASD's learning of some social rules and showed that children's perception of the robot plays an important role in their social learning, which provides insights on robot design and its clinical applications in ASD intervention.