Young Children's Indiscriminate Helping Behavior Toward a Humanoid Robot

People with Autism Spectrum Disorder Could Interact More Easily with a Robot than with a Human: Reasons and Limits

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder show deficits in communication and social interaction, as well as repetitive behaviors and restricted interests. Interacting with robots could bring benefits to this population, notably by fostering communication and social interaction. Studies even suggest that people with Autism Spectrum Disorder could interact more easily with a robot partner rather than a human partner. We will be looking at the benefits of robots and the reasons put forward to explain these results. The interest regarding robots would mainly be due to three of their characteristics: they can act as motivational tools, and they are simplified agents whose behavior is more predictable than that of a human. Nevertheless, there are still many challenges to be met in specifying the optimum conditions for using robots with individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Effects of morality and reputation on sharing behaviors in human-robot teams

Introduction

The relationship between robots and humans is becoming increasingly close and will become an inseparable part of work and life with humans and robots working together. Sharing, which involves distributing goods between individuals and others, involves individuals as potential beneficiaries and the possibility of giving up the interests of others. In human teams, individual sharing behaviors are influenced by morality and reputation. However, the impact on individuals' sharing behaviors in human-robot collaborative teams remains unclear-individuals may consider morality and reputation differently when sharing with robot or human partners. In this study, three experiments were conducted using the dictator game paradigm, aiming to compare the effects and mechanisms of morality and reputation on sharing behaviors in human and human-robot teams.

Methods

Experiment 1 involving 18 participants was conducted. Experiment 2 involving 74 participants was conducted. Experiment 3 involving 128 participants was conducted.

Results

Experiment 1 validated the differences in human sharing behaviors when the agents were robots and humans. Experiment 2 verifies that moral constraints and reputation constraints affect sharing behaviors in human-robot teams. Experiment 3 further reveals the mechanism of differences in sharing behaviors in human-robot teams, where reputation concern plays a mediating role in the impact of moral constraint on sharing behaviors, and the agent type plays a moderating role in the impact of moral constraint on reputation concern and sharing behaviors.

Discussion

The results of this study contribute to a better understanding of the interaction mechanism of human-robot teams. In the future, the formulation of human-robot collaborative team rules and the setting of interaction environments can consider the potential motivation of human behavior from both morality and reputation perspectives and achieve better work performance.

Pragmatics in the False-Belief Task: Let the Robot Ask the Question!

The poor performances of typically developing children younger than 4 in the first-order false-belief task "Maxi and the chocolate" is analyzed from the perspective of conversational pragmatics. An ambiguous question asked by an adult experimenter (perceived as a teacher) can receive different interpretations based on a search for relevance, by which children according to their age attribute different intentions to the questioner, within the limits of their own meta-cognitive knowledge. The adult experimenter tells the child the following story of object-transfer: "Maxi puts his chocolate into the green cupboard before going out to play. In his absence, his mother moves the chocolate from the green cupboard to the blue one." The child must then predict where Maxi will pick up the chocolate when he returns. To the child, the question from an adult (a knowledgeable person) may seem surprising and can be understood as a question of his own knowledge of the world, rather than on Maxi's mental representations. In our study, without any modification of the initial task, we disambiguate the context of the question by (1) replacing the adult experimenter with a humanoid robot presented as "ignorant" and "slow" but trying to learn and (2) placing the child in the role of a "mentor" (the knowledgeable person). Sixty-two typical children of 3 years-old completed the first-order false belief task "Maxi and the chocolate," either with a human or with a robot. Results revealed a significantly higher success rate in the robot condition than in the human condition. Thus, young children seem to fail because of the pragmatic difficulty of the first-order task, which causes a difference of interpretation between the young child and the experimenter.