Did the Children Behave?: Investigating the Relationship between Attachment Condition and Child Computer Interaction

Abstract

This work investigates the interplay between Child-Computer Interaction and attachment, a psychological construct that accounts for how children perceive their parents to be. In particular, the article makes use of a multimodal approach to test whether children with different attachment conditions tend to use differently the same interactive system. The experiments show that the accuracy in predicting usage behaviour changes, to a statistically significant extent, according to the attachment conditions of the 52 experiment participants (age-range 5 to 9). Such a result suggests that attachment-relevant processes are actually at work when people interact with technology, at least when it comes to children.