Identifying Differences in Social Responsiveness among Preschoolers Interacting with or Watching Social Robots

Identifying Differences in Social Responsiveness among Preschoolers Interacting with or Watching Social Robots

Marie D. Manner

Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Doctoral Consortium. Pages 5777-5778. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2018/832

We describe experiments performed with a large number of preschool children (ages 1.5 to 4 years) in a two-task eye tracking experiment and a human-robot interaction experiment. The resulting data of mostly neuro-typical children forms a baseline with which to compare children with autism, allowing us to further characterize the autism phenotype. Eye tracking task results indicate a strong preference for a humanoid robot and a social being (a four year old girl) over other robot types. Results from the human-robot interaction task, a semi-structured play interaction between child and robot, showed we can cluster participants based on social distances and other social responsiveness metrics.
Keywords:
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: Human-Computer Interaction