Babies Treat Robots as Social Beings

Oct 14, 2010

Babies are curious about nearly everything, and they're especially interested in what their adult companions are doing. Touch your tummy, they'll touch their own tummies. Wave your hands in the air, they'll wave their own hands. Turn your head to look at a toy, they'll follow your eyes to see what's so exciting.

Curiosity drives babies’ learning. At 18 months old, babies are intensely curious about what makes humans tick. A team of University of Washington researchers is studying how infants tell which entities are "psychological agents" that can think and feel.

New research by I-LABS scientists, published in the October/November issue of Neural Networks provides insight into how babies decide whether a new object, such as a robot, is sentient or an inanimate object. Four times as many babies who watched a robot interact socially with people were willing to learn from the robot than babies who did not see the interactions.

Read the research paper »