“Please don’t put me in the closet,” cries the robot. Last week, we wrote about a study that looked at whether humans attribute moral accountability and emotions to robots. This week, we’ve got a study from the same group, the Human Interaction With Nature and Technological Systems Lab (HINTS) at the University of Washington, that takes a look at what kind of relationships children are likely to form with social robot platforms, and it involves forcing their new robot friend into a dark, lonely closet. The 90 children in this study were separated into three groups by age: 9 year olds, 12 year olds, and 15 year olds, with an equal mix of boys and girls. As with the previous study, the robot involved in the research was Robovie, a vaguely humanoid robot that was secretly teleoperated to give it the appearance1 of a sophisticated (but not necessarily unrealistic) level of autonomy and interactivity. (via Do Kids Care If Their Robot Friend Gets Stuffed Into a Closet? - IEEE Spectrum)
