Imagining Others' Minds: The Positive Relation Between Children's Role Play and Anthropomorphism

Children and adults produce distinct technology- and human-directed speech

This study compares how English-speaking adults and children from the United States adapt their speech when talking to a real person and a smart speaker (Amazon Alexa) in a psycholinguistic experiment. Overall, participants produced more effortful speech when talking to a device (longer duration and higher pitch). These differences also varied by age: children produced even higher pitch in device-directed speech, suggesting a stronger expectation to be misunderstood by the system. In support of this, we see that after a staged recognition error by the device, children increased pitch even more. Furthermore, both adults and children displayed the same degree of variation in their responses for whether "Alexa seems like a real person or not", further indicating that children's conceptualization of the system's competence shaped their register adjustments, rather than an increased anthropomorphism response. This work speaks to models on the mechanisms underlying speech production, and human-computer interaction frameworks, providing support for routinized theories of spoken interaction with technology.

Ascribing consciousness to artificial intelligence: human-AI interaction and its carry-over effects on human-human interaction

The question of whether artificial intelligence (AI) can be considered conscious and therefore should be evaluated through a moral lens has surfaced in recent years. In this paper, we argue that whether AI is conscious is less of a concern than the fact that AI can be considered conscious by users during human-AI interaction, because this ascription of consciousness can lead to carry-over effects on human-human interaction. When AI is viewed as conscious like a human, then how people treat AI appears to carry over into how they treat other people due to activating schemas that are congruent to those activated during interactions with humans. In light of this potential, we might consider regulating how we treat AI, or how we build AI to evoke certain kinds of treatment from users, but not because AI is inherently sentient. This argument focuses on humanlike, social actor AI such as chatbots, digital voice assistants, and social robots. In the first part of the paper, we provide evidence for carry-over effects between perceptions of AI consciousness and behavior toward humans through literature on human-computer interaction, human-AI interaction, and the psychology of artificial agents. In the second part of the paper, we detail how the mechanism of schema activation can allow us to test consciousness perception as a driver of carry-over effects between human-AI interaction and human-human interaction. In essence, perceiving AI as conscious like a human, thereby activating congruent mind schemas during interaction, is a driver for behaviors and perceptions of AI that can carry over into how we treat humans. Therefore, the fact that people can ascribe humanlike consciousness to AI is worth considering, and moral protection for AI is also worth considering, regardless of AI's inherent conscious or moral status.

Anthropomorphizing Technology: A Conceptual Review of Anthropomorphism Research and How it Relates to Children's Engagements with Digital Voice Assistants

‘Anthropomorphism’ is a popular term in the literature on human-technology engagements, in general, and child-technology engagements, in particular. But what does it really mean to ‘anthropomorphize’ something in today’s world? This conceptual review article, addressed to researchers interested in anthropomorphism and adjacent areas, reviews contemporary anthropomorphism research, and it offers a critical perspective on how anthropomorphism research relates to today’s children who grow up amid increasingly intelligent and omnipresent technologies, particularly digital voice assistants (e.g., Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri). First, the article reviews a comprehensive body of quantitative as well as qualitative anthropomorphism research and considers it within three different research perspectives: descriptive, normative and explanatory. Following a brief excursus on philosophical pragmatism, the article then discusses each research perspective from a pragmatistic viewpoint, with a special emphasis on child-technology and child-voice-assistant engagements, and it also challenges some popular notions in the literature. These notions include descriptive ‘as if’ parallels (e.g., child behaves ‘as if’ Alexa was a friend), or normative assumptions that human-human engagements are generally superior to human-technology engagements. Instead, the article reviews different examples from the literature suggesting the nature of anthropomorphism may change as humans’ experiential understandings of humanness change, and this may particularly apply to today’s children as their social cognition develops in interaction with technological entities which are increasingly characterized by unprecedented combinations of human and non-human qualities.