Investigating Mental Representations about Robots in Preschool Children

TL;DR

This study explores preschool children's mental images of robots, revealing that while many see them as human-like, children also recognize non-human features and some understand basic programming concepts.

Contribution

It provides new insights into how young children conceptualize robots, combining drawing and interview methods to reveal nuanced mental representations.

Findings

64% of children drew human-like robots initially

Children's understanding of programming concepts was evident in interviews

Children's robot representations became less human-centric after discussions

Abstract

This paper refers to an observational research that investigates preschool children's mental representations of robots. Our hypotheses were that: a) three to six years-old children think about robots as human-like entities, concerning to both the physical and the conceptual nature of human beings, and b) they do not understand the concept of the software programming behind the operation of a robot. The study is based on two different data collection systems: an individual-based system and a group-based one. In both cases, the investigation uses a complex and multimodal research structure that combines a drawing-based approach with a conversational-discursive methodology. This paper focuses on the individual based data collection (348 drawings and 118 interviews). Preliminary results show that the human-like representation of robots is not the only one, even though it is present in about 64%of the drawings, and that this percentage decreases after the interview about robotics. Moreover, in several cases children refer to some concepts related to programming (e.g. the presence of sensors or human beings that make robots do things).