Unusual artifacts: Linking parents' STEM background and children's animacy judgments to parent–child play with robots

Abstract

Although prior work has investigated children's judgments of robots' animacy, we take a sociocultural perspective to extend this research by exploring how families' interactions with a robot and parents' STEM background relate to children's understanding of robots. We explored the social context of parent–child goal-directed play with an educational robot and asked whether children's judgments of the robot's animacy were predicted by (a) age, (b) parents' occupation (STEM, non-STEM), (c) parents' level of education, and (d) the complexity of communications with the robot. We recruited 72 parent–child dyads (3–6 years of age) at a children's museum to participate in a structured play session with a robot. Children then answered questions about animate and inanimate traits of several objects while parents completed a survey. We coded parents' and children's talk and behaviors considering the complexity of their communication with the robot. We found that children's age related to the way parents interacted with the robot, and parents' occupational category (STEM vs. non-STEM) was related to the way older children interacted with the robot. In particular, the proportion of children's complex commands increased with age for children from STEM families (but not for those from non-STEM families). We also found that children's perceived animacy for the robot was predicted by the amount of time that parents spent communicating about the robot with their child. This work highlights the need to consider children's reasoning about robots in light of social contexts within which children experience robots with parents and other people.