Competent robots preferred to incompetent human teachers: study

Researchers at Concordia University have found that preschoolers prefer to learn from a competent robot, rather than an incompetent human.

In a new study, published in the Journal of Cognition and Development, researchers 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, eg, 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,” said Anna-Elisabeth Baumann, the paper’s lead author.

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 said 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,” Baumann said.

While there has been a substantial amount of literature on the benefits of using robots as teaching aides for children, the researchers note that most studies focus on a single robot informant or two robots pitted against each other. This study, they write, is the first to use both a human speaker and a robot to see if children deem social affiliation and similarity more important than competency when choosing which source to trust and learn from.

Concordia University Chair of Developmental Cybernetics Diane Poulin-Dubois, who supervised the study, said that it builds on a previous paper she co-wrote. That paper shows that by age five, children treat robots similarly to how adults do, ie, as depictions of social agents.

“Older preschoolers know that robots have mechanical insides, but they still anthropomorphise them. Like adults, these children attribute certain human-like qualities to robots, such as the ability to talk, think and feel,” she said.

As technology use increases, and as children interact more with technological devices, it is important to understand how technology can be a tool to help facilitate their learning.

Image credit: iStock.com/Denis Novikov