What Are You Talking To?: Understanding Children's Perceptions of Conversational Agents

Conversational agents (CAs) available in smart phones or smart speakers play an increasingly important role in young children's technological landscapes and life worlds. While a handful of studies have documented children's natural interactions with CAs, little is known about children's perceptions of CAs. To fill this gap, we examined three- to six-year-olds' perceptions of CAs' animate/artifact domain membership and properties, as well as their justifications for these perceptions. We found that children sometimes take a more nuanced position and spontaneously attribute both artifact and animate properties to CAs or view them as neither artifacts nor animate objects. This study extends current research on children's perceptions of intelligent artifacts by adding CAs as a new genre of study and provides some underlying knowledge that may guide the development of CAs to support young children's cognitive and social development.

[1]  Manfred Tscheligi,et al.  “I Love This Dog”—Children’s Emotional Attachment to the Robotic Dog AIBO , 2009, Int. J. Soc. Robotics.

[2]  Niels Pinkwart,et al.  Review and Discussion of Children’s Conceptions of Computers , 2016 .

[3]  Nathan G. Freier,et al.  Social and moral relationships with robotic others? , 2004, RO-MAN 2004. 13th IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (IEEE Catalog No.04TH8759).

[4]  M. Scaife,et al.  “Because a robot's brain hasn't got a brain, it just controls itself” — Children's attributions of brain related behaviour to intelligent artefacts , 1996 .

[5]  S. Gelman,et al.  Robots and rodents: children's inferences about living and nonliving kinds. , 2007, Child development.

[6]  David Mioduser,et al.  Does it “want” or “was it programmed to...”? Kindergarten children’s explanations of an autonomous robot’s adaptive functioning , 2008 .

[7]  Wolmet Barendregt,et al.  Robots Tutoring Children: Longitudinal Evaluation of Social Engagement in Child-Robot Interaction , 2016, NordiCHI.

[8]  Sangsu Lee,et al.  "What does your Agent look like?": A Drawing Study to Understand Users' Perceived Persona of Conversational Agent , 2019, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[9]  Cynthia Breazeal,et al.  Assessing Children's Perceptions and Acceptance of a Social Robot , 2019, IDC.

[10]  Clifford Nass,et al.  The media equation - how people treat computers, television, and new media like real people and places , 1996 .

[11]  Heather E. Gary,et al.  Children's Social Relationships With Current and Near‐Future Robots , 2013 .

[12]  Shruti Sannon,et al.  "Alexa is my new BFF": Social Roles, User Satisfaction, and Personification of the Amazon Echo , 2017, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[13]  Ben J. A. Kröse,et al.  Relating conversational expressiveness to social presence and acceptance of an assistive social robot , 2010, Virtual Reality.

[14]  D. Rakison,et al.  Developmental origin of the animate-inanimate distinction. , 2001, Psychological bulletin.

[15]  Brian T. Gill,et al.  "Robovie, you'll have to go into the closet now": children's social and moral relationships with a humanoid robot. , 2012, Developmental psychology.

[16]  J. Kanero,et al.  Social robots for early language learning: Current evidence and future directionsijdschrift Approachvan dencal practice: A pilot study.uali , 2018 .

[17]  Mark Warschauer,et al.  Young Children's Reading and Learning with Conversational Agents , 2019, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[18]  Susan A. Gelman,et al.  Parent–child conversations regarding the ontological status of a robotic dog , 2016 .

[19]  Kara Chan,et al.  Exploring children's perceptions of material possessions: a drawing study , 2006 .

[20]  Soon-hyung Yi,et al.  Between living and nonliving: Young children’s animacy judgments and reasoning about humanoid robots , 2019, PloS one.

[21]  A. Caramazza,et al.  Domain-Specific Knowledge Systems in the Brain: The Animate-Inanimate Distinction , 1998, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[22]  W. R. Ford,et al.  Real conversations with artificial intelligence: A comparison between human-human online conversations and human-chatbot conversations , 2015, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[23]  Cynthia Breazeal,et al.  "Hey Google is it OK if I eat you?": Initial Explorations in Child-Agent Interaction , 2017, IDC.

[24]  Jason C. Yip,et al.  Using Co-Design to Examine How Children Conceptualize Intelligent Interfaces , 2018, CHI.

[25]  Pekka Mertala,et al.  Young children's perceptions of ubiquitous computing and the Internet of Things , 2019, Br. J. Educ. Technol..

[26]  C. Pelachaud,et al.  Expressive Gestures Displayed by a Humanoid Robot during a Storytelling Application , 2010 .

[27]  U. Goswami,et al.  The Wiley-Blackwell handbook of childhood cognitive development , 2010 .

[28]  Tanya N. Beran,et al.  Understanding how children understand robots: Perceived animism in child-robot interaction , 2011, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[29]  Kathleen H Corriveau,et al.  Young children's selective trust in informants , 2011, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[30]  Florian Jentsch,et al.  Effects of Robotic Social Cues on Interpersonal Attributions and Assessments of Robot Interaction Behaviors , 2015 .

[31]  Brian T. Gill,et al.  Children's Behavior toward and Understanding of Robotic and Living Dogs , 2009 .

[32]  Batya Friedman,et al.  Robotic pets in the lives of preschool children , 2004, CHI EA '04.

[33]  Michiteru Kitazaki,et al.  Young Children's Folk Knowledge of Robots , 2010 .

[34]  Abigail Sellen,et al.  "Like Having a Really Bad PA": The Gulf between User Expectation and Experience of Conversational Agents , 2016, CHI.

[35]  Jason Borenstein,et al.  Companion Robots and the Emotional Development of Children , 2013 .

[36]  D. Poulin-Dubois,et al.  The animate-inanimate distinction in preschool children. , 2015, The British journal of developmental psychology.

[37]  Anne Marie Piper,et al.  Hey Google, Do Unicorns Exist?: Conversational Agents as a Path to Answers to Children's Questions , 2019, IDC.

[38]  P. Marshall,et al.  Young Children’s Developing Understanding of the Biological World , 2016, Young Children’s Developing Understanding of the Biological World.

[39]  Roger K. Moore,et al.  Children's Age Influences Their Perceptions of a Humanoid Robot as Being Like a Person or Machine , 2015, Living Machines.

[40]  Donald Meichenbaum,et al.  Teaching thinking: a cognitive behavioral perspective , 2013 .

[41]  Cynthia Breazeal,et al.  How smart are the smart toys?: children and parents' agent interaction and intelligence attribution , 2018, IDC.

[42]  Cynthia Breazeal,et al.  Young Children Treat Robots as Informants , 2016, Top. Cogn. Sci..

[43]  Mike van Duuren,et al.  Do computers have brains ? What children believe about intelligent artifacts , 1995 .

[44]  Klaus R. Scherer,et al.  Vocal communication of emotion , 2000 .

[45]  C. Breazeal.  Role of expressive behaviour for robots that learn from people , 2009, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[46]  Yanghee Kim,et al.  Pedagogical agents as learning companions: the impact of agent emotion and gender , 2007, J. Comput. Assist. Learn..

[47]  Jodi Forlizzi,et al.  "Hey Alexa, What's Up?": A Mixed-Methods Studies of In-Home Conversational Agent Usage , 2018, Conference on Designing Interactive Systems.

[48]  Lydia Plowman,et al.  Young children's everyday concepts of the internet: A platform for cyber-safety education in the early years , 2018, Br. J. Educ. Technol..

[49]  Patrice D. Tremoulet,et al.  Perception of Animacy from the Motion of a Single Object , 2000, Perception.

[50]  John F. Canny,et al.  What did spot hide?: a question-answering game for preschool children , 2014, CHI.

[51]  Jon Swain,et al.  A Hybrid Approach to Thematic Analysis in Qualitative Research: Using a Practical Example , 2018 .

[52]  Sandra L. Calvert,et al.  Children’s future parasocial relationships with media characters: the age of intelligent characters , 2016 .

[53]  Margaret-Ellen Pipe,et al.  Enhancing children's event recall after long delays , 2007 .

[54]  K. Crowley,et al.  Searching for Signs of Intelligent Life: An Investigation of Young Children's Beliefs About Robot Intelligence , 2008 .

[55]  Stephanie M. Carlson,et al.  Behaving as or behaving as if? Children's conceptions of personified robots and the emergence of a new ontological category , 2010, Neural Networks.