Could social robots facilitate children with autism spectrum disorders in learning distrust and deception?
Journal article, 2019

Social robots have been increasingly involved in our daily lives and provide a new environment for children's growth. The current study aimed to examine how children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD)learned complex social rules from a social robot through distrust and deception games. Twenty children with ASD between the ages of 5–8 and 20 typically-developing (TD)peers whose age and IQ were matched participated in distrust and deception tasks along with an interview about their perception of the human-likeness of the robot. The results demonstrated that: 1)children with ASD were slower to learn to and less likely to distrust and deceive a social robot than TD children and 2)children with ASD who perceived the robot to appear more human-like had more difficulty in learning to distrust the robot. Besides, by comparing to a previous study the results showed that children with ASD appeared to have more difficulty in learning to distrust a human compared to a robot, particularly in the early phase of learning. Overall, our study verified that social robots could facilitate children with ASD's learning of some social rules and showed that children's perception of the robot plays an important role in their social learning, which provides insights on robot design and its clinical applications in ASD intervention.

Trust

Anthropomorphic thinking

Deception

Autism spectrum disorder

Social robots

Author

Yaoxin Zhang

Beijing University of Technology

Wenxu Song

South China Normal University

Zhenlin Tan

South China Normal University

Huilin Zhu

Sun Yat-Sen University

Yuyin Wang

Sun Yat-Sen University

Cheuk Man Lam

Chinese Academy of Sciences

Yifang Weng

University of Toronto

Sio Pan Hoi

Beijing University of Technology

Haoyang Lu

Beijing University of Technology

Bella Siu Man Chan

University of British Columbia (UBC)

Jiajia Chen

South China Normal University

Chalmers, Electrical Engineering, Communication, Antennas and Optical Networks

Li Yi

Beijing University of Technology

Computers in Human Behavior

0747-5632 (ISSN)

Vol. 98 140-149

Subject Categories

Learning

Interaction Technologies

Robotics

DOI

10.1016/j.chb.2019.04.008

More information

Latest update

12/2/2021