The Peppa Pig Crowd
Today we will take on completely new things.
Our preschoolers [“the little sparkles in their eyes when they watch The Peppa Pig” (btw most irritating cartoon!)] love to learn from Robots.
🤪 🤪 🤪 They aren’t alone! 🤪 🤪 🤪
Researchers at the Cognition and Language Development Lab tested three- and five-year-olds to see whether robots could be better teachers than people.
I mean, why not!?
(I hated my teachers! The favoritism towards some students and bias in so many other ways!! My gosh, it’s a trauma I don’t wanna revisit.) 🙄
Anywho…Moving on….
Preschoolers prefer to learn from a competent robot than from an incompetent human. (Ditto!😈).
The study compared two groups of preschoolers: one of three-year-olds, the other of five-year-olds.
The children participated in Zoom meetings featuring a video of a young woman and a small robot with humanoid characteristics (head, face, torso, arms and legs) called Nao sitting side by side. Between them were familiar objects that the robot would label correctly while the human would label them incorrectly, e.g., referring to a car as a book, a ball as a shoe and a cup as a dog.
Next, the two groups of children were presented with unfamiliar items: the top of a turkey baster, a roll of twine and a silicone muffin container. Both the robot and the human used different nonsense terms like “mido,” “toma,” “fep” and “dax” to label the objects. The children were then asked what the object was called, endorsing either the label offered by the robot or by the human.
While the three-year-olds showed no preference for one word over another, the five-year-olds were much more likely to state the term provided by the robot than the human.
“We can see that by age five, children are choosing to learn from a competent teacher over someone who is more familiar to them — even if the competent teacher is a robot,” says the paper’s lead author, PhD candidate Anna-Elisabeth Baumann.
Horizon Postdoctoral Fellow Elizabeth Goldman and undergraduate research assistant Alexandra Meltzer also contributed to the study. Professor and Concordia University Chair of Developmental Cybernetics Diane Poulin-Dubois in the Department of Psychology supervised the study.
The researchers repeated the experiments with new groups of three- and five-year-olds, replacing the humanoid Nao with a small truck-shaped robot called Cozmo. The results resembled those observed with the human-like robot, suggesting that the robot’s morphology does not affect the children’s selective trust strategies.
Baumann adds that, along with the labelling task, the researchers administered a naive biology task. The children were asked if biological organs or mechanical gears formed the internal parts of unfamiliar animals and robots.
The three-year-olds appeared confused, assigning both biological and mechanical internal parts to the robots. However, the five-year-olds were much more likely to indicate that only mechanical parts belonged inside the robots.
“This data tells us that the children will choose to learn from a robot even though they know it is not like them. They know that the robot is mechanical,” says Baumann.
“It is important to emphasize that we see robots as tools to study how children can learn from both human and non-human agents,” concludes Goldman.
“As technology use increases, and as children interact with technological devices more, it is important for us to understand how technology can be a tool to help facilitate their learning.”
Adults love to hang out with ChatGPT! So what if kids only learn through robots? 💁🏻♀️💁🏻♀️
Follow more on How AI around us makes an Impact more than Humans! by Jasmin Bharadiya
